The Sheila Variations

And finally -

one of my favorite poems ever. It seems a bit a propos today.

The More Loving One
by Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Iraqi prisoners

Some people have a sense of decency towards their fellow man, and some people do not.

I am ashamed, disgusted, and upset. Look at the grinning face of that US servicewoman. (Scroll down) It is chilling. It reminds me of those horrible photos of laughing crowds at lynchings.

She has no sense of decency.

Americans do not hold the moral high ground just because we are Americans. To me, that seems like a self-evident statement - but you would be surprised, the resistance I come up against when I say shit like that. People are overly sentimental about what it means to live in this great nation - yes, OVERLY sentimental - and forget that we also produce evil people, we also do horrible things - we are capable of horrors. Of COURSE we are, because Americans are, after all, members of the human race, and if there's anything I have learned during my sojourn on this planet, it is that human beings, in general, are capable of horrible things.

Here's one of the comments to the post I link to, which is evidence of this blinkered moral-high-ground thinking:

Sorry, but I'll wait until the investigation is done and the military is done dispensing justice before I'll get worked up about this. We can re-pave the "Arab Street" if it rises up. The prisoners were allegedly humiliated, that's all. Deplorable, if true, but not summarily executed and dumped into a mass grave. When they and their bloodline are running airliners into our skyscrapers killing thousands of innocents, being made to stand on a box with playing electric ghost is something I can't get fired up about.

I appreciate the probability that some will be offended and may cause trouble, but this is a scant % of the prisoners we hold.

This is a frightening line of thinking. I was glad to see another commenter reply to that:

The fact is that we MUST be better than this, or we are lying to ourselves about what we stand for. I would have no problem whatsoever with a "forceful" field interrogation of prisoners to obtain tactical information, etc. But once we are out of tactical danger, we MUST treat prisoners the way we would have OUR military treated, were they captured by the other side. I know that the other side, particularly the Islamofascists, do NOT treat our prisoners better than this, but that is their sin; it should NEVER be ours.

If we aren't better than our enemies, we don't stand for shit. I am proud of my country, and I am proud of the men and women who serve in my country's military, but I recognize there are bad apples in EVERY barrel - the trick is to find them and dispose of them, post haste. The "soldiers" who perpetrated this shameful episode should and must be punished to the full extent of the law.

And John is right; more men and women in our uniform will die because of what these subhuman assholes did.

If you think 9/11 justifies our acting like savages, you are sadly mistaken, and a sick individual.

Now that is something I can get behind. We must not sit on some high horse, thinking we can behave in this disgusting manner.

If this is true - and it seems to be - then these servicemen and women have done us, and our cause, and the ideals of America grave grave harm. They should be ashamed of themselves, and I hope they are punished within the full extent of the law.

Touch of Evil

Dan lists the three scariest movies he has ever seen. (Please go over there and read what he has to say, because he certainly has a way with words:

Sinister little girls are now on the list of Wrong Things Best Avoided right alongside clowns and mimes.

Wow. I LOVE sinister little girls, Dan! I think they're awesome, wish I could spend all my spare time with some sinister little girls. What is your problem, Dan??

And please read Dan's terrifying description of watching the COMMERCIAL for The Changeling, as a 10 year old. He has never even seen the damn film, people, but the COMMERCIAL left such an imprint of terror that he has included it on his list of "scariest movies ever". Now that's one frightening-ass commercial!

I remember that I was absolutely haunted by a commercial for "Magic" when I was a kid - the marionette's eyes gleaming through the dark. I still, to this day, have never seen that film.

Okay, so my 3 scariest movies ever? We got into a bit of a discussion about this over at Bill's blog the other day.

1. Rosemary's Baby. Believe it or not, I have put myself through the torturous experience of that film a COUPLE of times. Because it's so damn good, and because it's like needing to touch a hot stove or something. You WANT to be scared. This is # 1 on my list because - I have to say that I do not ENJOY this film. This film is unpleasantly frightening. It is agony. There are so many levels to the scariness. Ruth Gordon - has a sweet little old lady ever been so freakin' scary?? The whole "devil" thing, which I find terrifying ANYway. And then - even the CAMERA angles are designed to keep you on your edge, keep you shook up. It's unbearable. Unpleasantly scary. Kudos to Mr. Polanski. You did your job, and transformed me into a quivery shrieking mess.

2. The Exorcist Again with the scary devil theme. But I've seen The Omen as well - and that's just kind of cheesy and bad. The Exorcist really seems to BELIEVE in the devil. The devil exists. Again, there is nothing pleasant about this film. It is like being locked in a tiny cobwebby basement, with no light, knowing that there's some beast in the darkness. You cannot get away, you are trapped, you cease being a human being, and just become a racing heart-beat. This movie is an assault. One of the scariest movies ever made. (I'm sure it can't hold a candle to The Changeling, Dan.)

3. The Ring I know, I know, you could drive Mack trucks through the plot holes. Who WAS that woman on the phone?? It makes no sense. But this is the first "horror movie" I have seen in a long time which seemed to dedicate itself to the "art" of the horror movie - like Polanski did in "Rosemary's Baby". Not relying on special effects alone to get your screams - but to create terrifying camera angles, to use music sparingly, to go completely for atmosphere - which wraps your audience in a horrified blanket. I made the mistake of renting it by myself, and watching it alone. I had heard people say, "That is one damn scary movie" - but it made me curious to see it, rather than terrified. HUGE mistake. I had to turn the damn thing off, and take breaks, where I would breathe deeply, turn on all the lights, reassure myself: "It's just a movie ... it's just a movie ..." Even now, I am not sure what exactly I found so scary. I've already blocked the whole thing out.

I guess I have been living in denial

because I can't comprehend the fact that there are still people out there, with all of the information we have at our disposal, with everything we know now, who would make such statements as:

"Communism isnt bad... the people who use communism are bad."

And that is just one of the idiotic statements made. Others have to do with Saddam having created a "free republic" and a "market economy".

Boggles the mind.

(via Val)

Friday frivolity

I got it from Michele, and she got it from Treacher.

1. Grab the nearest CD.
2. Put it in your CD-Player (or start your mp3-player, I-tunes, etc.).
3. Skip to Song 3 (or load the 3rd song in your 3rd playlist)
4. Post the first verse in your journal along with these instructions. Don’t name the band, nor the album-title.

Get a load of me, get a load of you
Walking down the street
And I hardly know you
It's just like we were meant to be,
holding hands with you when we're out at night
Got a girlfriend but you say it isn't right
And I've got something waiting, too
What if this is just the beginning?
We're already wet and we're gonna go swimming

No Googling allowed.

Diary Friday

In a weird self-referential way, I like the writing in the following journal entry. That is so vain of me to say. But oh well. It describes one of my "good-bye" moments in Chicago - a couple of weeks before I left to move to New York. It involves one of the triumvirate, by the way. Ha! And for whatever reason - the way I chose to write about the night, what I chose to tell, the details ... it all seems to capture exactly what that night was all about. A lot of times it's difficult to write about poignant moments. I feel that in this I succeeded.

Also, it was a very fun night. A wonderful memory. It's so CHICAGO.

July 27

Last night: Went out with three people from work. Bill, Kerry, Bill - sat outside and drank margaritas. I always knew I'd get on socially with these people. We had a wonderful time, toasting my future, but also talking about their lives, their goals, what's up. My life is bringing up issues for all of them, making them take a look at what they want, so we had a GREAT time, getting drunk, talking about life. Then I went tattoo shopping on Belmont, and they all tagged along. After that, Bill and I walked together - we both live in the same area. We parted at Clark and Addison, and then, on a tequila impulse, I crossed the street to the improv club. The door was locked. I peeked through the window, and saw it was empty but there were some lights on. I knocked on the window. But to no avail. Oh well. I tried. I walked home.

Jim and George are there, getting ready to go out for a drink. I bombarded them with tequila-silliness, made a laughing stock out of myself. George was laughing right in my face. 5 or 10 minutes after I got home, I was getting ready to leave with Jim and George, and the phone rang. Jim was on the other line with Steven, and another call came in. "Hello?." He looked over at me. I knew it was for me. Jim just gave me this look, then said, "Hold on one second." Then went back to the call with Steven, said, "I've gotta go - Okay - bye!" and then handed the phone to me without saying anything. But I knew who it was.

"Hello?"

"Sheila?"

"Yes?"

"Sheila?"

"This is Sheila. Is this M.?"

"Yes."

"Hi. Where are you?"

"The theatre."

(Now that is totally weird.) "That's so weird cause I was just up there about 15 minutes ago, knocking on the window."

"Really? That is weird."

"I stopped by the theatre, looking for you, like - let me in! Let me in!"

"I didn't hear you. I've been up here playing the piano."

I felt a pinch in my heart. I said, "Can I come up?"

"Yeah, come on up."

"I want you to play for me."

"I will."

So I hung up and began Phase II of my evening.

George and Jim's faces as they said goodbye to me were priceless. I had whirled through their relatively calm space with a burst of manic insane energy, and then boom, I was gone. Out the door.

Walked back up to the club. The door was now open - other people were milling about. I breezed by them and charged in to find my M. He was sitting in the downstairs space in one of the low chairs, smoking, reading over some sides. We said hello. I sat on the stage, looked over the sides with him. He told me what the audition was. He had made some changes in the script, his handwriting squiggling in the margins. I think he was glad to see me. We have such funny Dada-esque conversations. They are satisfying to me in a way that other conversations are not. He knows I'm moving to New York, but he doesn't ask details. I don't feel the need to offer them up. There's an honesty in our dynamic. There's no lying. And once you start talking honestly, it's easier and easier to keep going. Harder and harder to stop. Lies and denials have no place. It feels unnatural and stilted with him to have it any other way.

M. came to see Lesbian Bathhouse [Ed: Yes. I was in a late-night show, which was a huge hit, called Lesbian Bathhouse. Needless to say, it is not on my resume.] - he squeezed in my show between two of his own shows. E for Effort. He said, "I liked your work" with this serious suddenly sincere look on his face. We hugged big and hard. He called me and told me when he could come. I didn't chase him down at all. Very pro-active for one of the least pro-active men I know.

He sat in the audience, over to the side, watching my work like a hawk, empirically, leaning forward, elbows on knees, intent, not laughing much, but paying strict and rigid attention. Cute. It meant a lot to me that he came.

If I had been told, when I met this man, that three years later any of this would be going on, that we would have this normal friend-like thing going on, I would not have been able to picture it at all. But it has happened, and it doesn't feel out of the ordinary at all.

We've already laughed about him visiting me in NYC. I can just see the 2 of us, wandering around Times Square, having an insanely fun Dada-esque time. He told me he's not done much traveling - he traveled through Europe, Italy, etc., in high school with his choir, but not much else. He's only been to Manhattan a few times.

Meg came down with her dog. [Ed: She was the owner and manager of the club.] M. introduced us. She and I have never really met, strange as that is. She was very cordial. M. gave her his sides. She would be working with him on them the next day, he wanted her help. She clearly adores him. Respects him. It was interesting to watch them together. Then Meg left, locking the doors behind her. We were alone.

We talked a little bit more about his audition, about the closing night of Hamlet. He lit 3 or 4 candles, turned off all the rest of the lights - it was such a Chicago scene - it was so US - and he sat down at the piano. He played for me for about an hour. I've never heard him play. He played like a maniac, vigorously, passionately. A lot of Elton John, Billy Joel - also his own stuff. He played me the first song he ever wrote: "I warn you. It is really corny" - and it was this heart-broken love-sick song. I laughed in his face, as I listened to the words.

But I sang along to the other stuff. I lay down on my back on the black stage, legs splayed out, and sang. Throwing my voice up to the ceiling. In the middle of songs, he kept apologizing for how out of shape his voice was. He's a great piano player.

I can't even tell you how happy and fulfilled the whole thing made me. As he played, I moved around. Sometimes I danced, sometimes I stood behind him to watch his fingers, sometimes I sat on a stool and drank a beer, listening.

I'd look across the candlelit space - at him - at the piano - at his head of crazy black hair - and I didn't think anything. I was BEING. My soul was flying out of my body into the universe. I am! I am! I am! [Ed: I must have read over this later, and felt embarrassed by it - because I wrote a note to myself: "I just reread that last sentence and feel a bit embarrassed at the melodrama. I felt like crossing it out, but y'know what? As goofy as the sentiment is, it's the truth. It was where I was at that night with him."]

Fleeting. Life is so short. I am so conscious of that. Especially now, since my time left in Chicago is so short.

I'll stop what I'm doing - and just breathe it in. Give myself the order: Stop. Listen. Smell. Look. All of this is so fleeting. My life here will be gone in 4 weeks. Appreciate. It's not that hard to do, actually. Nothing is normal now. My future is unknown, and my present has a tangible limit to it. So I am filled with the sense of ending, of good-byes, of last times.

It's so poignant.

I cry pretty much every day. But then again, I laugh pretty much every day too.

I said at one point to M., "My favorite album of Billy Joel's is the Songs in the Attic album."

He said, hands poised and ready, "What songs do you like from that album?"

"'The Night the Lights Went Out on Broadway.'"

And he started the intro immediately. It was awesome. I love that piano at the beginning. We both sang the hell out of that song - and we forgot the lyrics at exactly the same point - and both burst into laughter.

The piano at the club is a battered old grand, with stained keys - and M. is this battered guy, this crazy guy in my life - it was fantastic. One of my favorite nights I have ever had in Chicago.

M. will be an always person in my life. He won't just drop out of sight and heart and mind, like some of the others. I have known this for a while, but it still amazes me.

A dim candlelit bar, inhabited by me, M., and a piano. Happiness: singing with him, him playing the piano - the two of us talking in between songs. I loved lying on my back, and listening to the music. Losing myself in the moment.

M. can be such an innocent. He said to me, so cute, all enthusiastic and wistful, "Last year - did you know that Elton John and Billy Joel toured together? Can you imagine that?? The two of them together? And I missed it! Did you hear about that??"

That was such a highly publicized tour, last year, and he was so behind the times. It was endearing, him saying, "Did you hear??" like that.

I said, "Uhm ... EVERYBODY knew about that tour, M."

He shrugged, kind of sheepish, still improvising carelessly on the piano. "Well - not up on the concert scene. You know."

"Yeah. I know."

He got up to go back to the bathroom, after about an hour of singing, playing, talking. And I was alone. Leave me alone nowadays, and I am instantly 100% contemplative, nostalgic, aware.

It got so quiet, like a blanket over the place. I was sitting absolutely still. Only my eyes moved. I looked around, and I saw EVERYTHING. Everything. I saw life. I saw the details of the bar in a microscopic way, but I saw myself - in the context of my LIFE - and how this life is ending and a new one beginning.

I looked from candle to candle to candle - some in red glass holders, others in yellow glass holders - I saw the Hamlet sign - purple - with the T a man, head thrown back, arms spread out - exclamation point - darkened Miller Genuine Draft sign - the black pipes overhead - the silent living piano next to me - M. down the hall in the bathroom - this person in my life who has afforded me some of the funniest memories, who has really made Chicago this very specific place for me - a panorama. Every beat of my heart I felt, as I looked around - goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye

And it's not like I spend a lot of time in a locked-up improv club with M. Last night was the first time. But it is the context I am familiar with. And I will miss the context.

Because it is done. I know it's done.

And every second that went by, I was saying goodbye. And Thank You at the same time.

It was so vivid, so potent. Pain and joy all mixed up together. Feeling impending loss, anticipatory nostalgia, and overwhelming gratitude.

M. came out of the bathroom to find me sitting there in a daze of tears. He sat back down at the piano. Lit a cigarette. Didn't ask, "What's going on?" He's always okay with me, wherever I'm at. I told him about what had just gone down. What I had just perceived. What I saw.

"I'm going to miss you," I said.

M. said, in this very simple way, "Oh ... I'll always be here."

And he started to play again.

Is he a piece of work or what?

After this, we poured ourselves plastic cups of beer, sat on stools, and talked. We reminisced, we laughed about the first night we met. It was great. We never talk like that. But there's this huge good-bye approaching. He feels it too.

Then, we walked down the street to an all-night gyros place to stuff our faces. It was 2 in the morning. We walked by Wrigley Field. It always gives me this feeling - it looks like a Coliseum - especially late at night, when it is dark, and quiet. Looming above the neighborhood like some ruin of an ancient and long-gone time.

M. had hurt his arm pretty bad during his show that night, and he was being all manly about it, but I could tell he was in pain.

"Your arm?"

He nodded, being very stoic and manly. I switched to his other side and massaged his arm as we walked. He let me do this, which made me realize how bad it was.

We got to this DIVE across from The Metro. The skankiest people in the world were there. A toothless man in a baseball cap drinking coffee. Video games. I wanted nothing on the menu. I remember that M. ordered a "pizza puff" and I burst into laughter. Finally, I ordered a fish sandwich. (Not eating wasn't an option. I was hungry.) I also ordered a huge lemonade.

M. paid. "I got this, kid", he said with huge magnanimity, as though he is some international tycoon.

As we waited for our food, standing at the counter, M. was silently in agony, rubbing his right shoulder, flexing his hand. I felt for him.

"Oh, how bad is it? Did you pull something?"

He nodded. Manly. "It hurts."

I said to the exhausted greasy man behind the counter, "Do you have any aspirin?"

He gestured at a bunch of packets taped up by the register. "Look, M.! You want some?"

"2 packets ..."

"Here." I ripped it off.

He opened one packet, popped the 2 aspirin in his mouth, and I held my lemonade straw up to his lips. He took the other 2 aspirin as well.

"That should help," I said.

"Well, at least I'll be able to sleep." (He has a cot in the back of the theatre - he sleeps there sometimes.)

We sat at a booth, waiting, talking, drinking lemonade. We got our stuff and headed back to eat at the theatre. As we passed Wrigley Field, we both, I felt, were having the same response to the place. I was staring up at it, quiet. So was he. It was dark and quiet, in the middle of a Chicago summer night. I will miss this. My Wrigley Field.

I didn't leap into his brain, or anything like that - I just felt like he and I were thinking the same thing. And suddenly he said, staring up at it, "It's funny to think ... people travel to Chicago ... specifically ... to see Wrigley Field ... to see this ... and to me ... it's just something that I walk by every day."

I said, "I know just what you mean."

We sat at the bar, in the dark, turned on the TV, and unwrapped our food. We watched "Tap" of all things. We are an absolutely ridiculous pair. We discussed the film, commented, we ate our food. Sharing, of course. My fish sandwich was supremely and wonderfully awful. Unbelievable. Perfect.

It was 3:30 by this point, by the time I was done eating, and I was ready to go home. I mean, I live a 5 minute walk away. It's so close that I literally, even when intoxicated, cannot justify a cab.

I put my arms around M., hugged him heartily - it had been a great night - and then I left, locking the door behind me - leaving him alone inside the bar.

My dark-haired crazy friend.

Next stop: Bellevue

Lots of fun last night, with Steve, Jim, and Bill - We met up at Bellevue, a bar right next to Port Authority - and one of my favorite places in the city. You kind of have to see it to believe it. It is dark, rough, and filled with biker chicks, and tough bouncers with hearts of gold. (I swear.) The jukebox is phenomenal. Filled with Metallica, Led Zeppelin, U2, and random Johnny Cash. Bill took care of our song selection.

On the TVs over the bar, they show skanky weird-looking porn from the 70s.

I remember I was there once for a party with my friend Hunter. There had been this huge reading of new poets at the Whitney Museum, which we had attended - (I knew the organizer) - and afterwards, the entire crowd of literati headed to Bellevue. Poets, and bikers, mingling freely. Everyone losing their minds when "Enter Sandman" came on. "Enter Sandman" crosses cultural barriers. Poets were jamming to the song with bikers, and all was right with the world. Hunter and I sat at the bar, talking - or trying to talk over the music, and on one TV at one end of the bar they were showing this weird Ron Jeremy-era porn, and on the other TV at the other end of the bar they were showing a biography of Evil Kneivel. We literally did not know how to split our focus. It was hilarious. It was like being in some ancient rec room with paneled walls, during my childhood. Hunter and I got so sucked into the Evil Kneivel thing, we had this very DEEP conversation about Evil Kneivel (ha ha) - it was only later that we could actually laugh at ourselves.

Bill, Steve, Jim and I talked like maniacs about everything under the sun. That's what I love about bloggers, in general. The conversation NEVER STOPS. You never have awkward, "Hmm, what am I going to say next" moments.

Great fun. Have to do it again some time.

Here's Steve take on the tale. Love the title (it has multiple levels of meaning. See if you can guess it.)

And here's Bill's post.

Et cetera?

Tsar Nicholas II had this for a complete title:

Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Libonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialostock, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, and other countries; Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav and all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig Hosstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars, and of Oldenbourg, etc.

It's that "etc." at the end that really kills me.

Five Easy Pieces

Saw it a couple nights ago. (The binge continues).

The famous "chicken salad" scene is just as funny as the first time I saw it. Especially the last moment - the sort of flat obnoxious expression on Nicholson's face. I laughed out loud, immediately rewound it, and watched it again.

Dupea [Jack Nicholson's character]: I'd like a plain omelette, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, a cup of coffee and wheat toast.

Waitress (points to the menu): No substitutions.

Dupea: What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?

Waitress: Only what's on the menu. You can have a No. 2--a plain omelette. It comes with cottage fries and rolls.

Dupea: Yeah, I know what it comes with. But it's not what I want.

Waitress: Well, I'll come back when you make up your mind.

Dupea: Wait a minute. I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelette, no potatoes on the plate, a cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.

Waitress: I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast...an English muffin or a coffee roll.

Dupea: What do you mean you don't make side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?

Waitress: Would you like to talk to the manager?

Dupea: You've got bread and a toaster of some kind?

Waitress: I don't make the rules.

Dupea: OK, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelette, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.

Waitress: A No. 2, chicken sal san, hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Dupea: Yeah. Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.

Waitress (angry): You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

Dupea: I want you to hold it between your knees.

The Peace of Westfalia

This post, by Jess, about cars in her past made me realize, (for the first time, weirdly), that I have never owned a car on my own.

What kind of person never owns a car? I never needed one in Chicago - and now in New York I am quite glad to not have one. It would be nice, though, to have the option to get out of Dodge, should the impulse come over me.

My first boyfriend and I bought 2 vehicles together - but he was kind of bossy - so I didn't feel like the vehicles were mine, in any way/shape/form. Even though I paid for half of them.

The first car we bought together was a used Nissan 300 ZX. It was GOLD, as well. A ridiculous car. It was so low to the ground you basically had to lie down on the pavement to slide your way through the door. We would zip up and down the highways of the Northeast Corridor in our small gold bullet, blasting our GEEKY music, going from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds flat. A dumb car.

Then we started planning for this massive 2-month jaunt across the country. From Philadelphia to San Fran.

We bought a used Westfalia, had our furniture shipped across the country to meet us in San Fran, and took off. We lived in that van. We cooked in it. We drove it across mountain ranges, through deserts, over bridges, across the plains. It is an amazingly hardy vehicle. We would have these "Easy Rider" moments, at some campsite, with a flickering camp fire, and coffee brewing in a pot inside the Westphalia, the blue flame of the stove trembling through the dark.

And then we got to Death Valley and one of our tires exploded. Literally. Exploded into shreds on the hot pavement. We careened off to the side of the road. It was the kind of landscape which glimmers, as though it is water, and I kept thinking I saw liquidy lush green fields up in the distance. My first experience with desert mirages. Boyfriend changed the tire, then we had to buy a new tire which caused us to run out of money a month ahead of time.

So we cut off the rest of the trip, and careened up the coast of California to San Fran.

We lived in San Fran for a bit, and I remember that perhaps one of the proudest moments of my ENTIRE LIFE was when I successfully parallel parked that clunky stick-shift van, on one of those precarious hills. It took me 25 minutes, I was in a panic, a sweat, I thought I would lose control and plummet down the hill to my death, that something would snap, that the clutch would go, that complete and utter disaster would ensue. When I finally got that van into its spot, I had a small private moment of pride. I DID it.

A month later, I moved to Los Angeles, I took the van with me (all of my stuff was in the van - I had furniture, and filing cabinets, and boxes and boxes of books - He and I had not just taken the trip across the country for fun, we were in the process of actually moving out to California - so all of our stuff had been shipped to the new digs in San Fran.)

Anyway. It was a confusing chaotic time. I moved to LA, one of my college friends hooked me up with a friend of his aunt who let me stay at her place for free, while I got my act together (which looked like it was going to be a pretty big job). She lived in Woodland Hills - a woman I didn't even know - but she let me stay in her house. Woodland Hills was like the 8th circle of hell. I knew nobody in Los Angeles.

I got temp jobs in random offices, and I would show up for work driving the battered Westfalia, filled with my furniture from Philadelphia. Quite a spectacle I was.

I got my first flat-tire on some shriek-y terrifying freeway. I was headed "home" from my temp job, so I had on my little temp outfit. Heels, etc. Boyfriend had always been the "I'll change the tire" type. Without him, I had to figure it out on my own. I did so - beautifully. I jacked up the damn VAN, on the side of the freeway (I felt so conspicuous - everyone has these little zippy cars, and I was like some reject from a commune, wandering down the 405) - and changed the tire. I felt like the most successful and triumphant woman on the planet.

The next day, I got my second flat-tire. I changed the tire as deftly as an old pro.

Two weeks later, I was driving in Woodland Hills, having kind of a nervous breakdown, truth be told, and I put my foot down on the clutch and I felt something pop. I felt this very small deep-down snap, within the belly of the van - and immediately I got this cold feeling all over: Oh God. That sounded BAD. This is BAD.

(I was broke. I was living with a strange old woman. I had broken up with my boyfriend. I had no friends. And now the car...)

Various and sundry insane moments followed:

-- I abandoned the van at a stoplight, in the middle of the road, somewhere in Woodland Hills, and as I walked away, I kept turning to scream back at the van: "OH, SCREW YOU, SCREW YOU" like an escaped lunatic. I knew I would not have the money to fix whatever BAD thing had just happened. Being without a car in Los Angeles is, of course, unthinkable.

-- Two cops saw me standing in the middle of the street, screaming at my own vehicle. They basically made me get into their squad car with them

-- They told me they would call a tow truck. I leaned over the back seat into the front and said, right into their faces, defiantly, "I have NO MONEY. None. NONE." I was yelling at two members of the LAPD.

-- They tried to calm me down. "We'll work something out for you. It'll be fine, ma'am. Do you want some water?"

-- The tow truck arrived. Meanwhile, my abandoned van was causing a near ruckus in the traffic. I stalked over to the tow truck guy, said not a word, and just showed him the inside of my empty wallet. Look here, guy, ya ever see anything as empty as this WALLET? I had this crazy grin on my face, daring him to turn me down. (I don't think I've ever been so publicly out of control as I was during these 20 minutes.)

Recently, I did an imitation of this entire thing for my cousin Emma and my aunt Regina, and they were laughing so hard they were crying. Especially with crazy Sheila leaning over into the front seat, snapping some crazy remark at the cops, and also the showing of the empty wallet. It's funny NOW, but then ... no no no, it was not funny!

-- So Tow-Truck man, like the cops, probably realized that I was having a sort of meltdown, and gave me a tow for free.

-- Dropped the STUPID van off and then had no way to get "home", no way to get back to the strange house with the strange old woman. So I walked home. It was a 45 minute walk.

-- On the way home, suddenly it was as though my brain started working again, and I thought: "What. The Hell. Am I DOING???" Sense returned. I could see my life, I could see how unhappy I was, and I could see that I actually could do something about it.

-- I stopped at a pay phone, during this interminable walk home, and called my friend Jackie, collect. She was living in Chicago, and having a great time, acting in shows, doing great - and I spontaneously called her and said that I was going to move to Chicago as soon as I could, and could she put me up until I found a place of my own? She said Of course.

-- I became a whirlwind of desperate activity. GET ME OUT OF HERE. I sold off most of my stuff - This kindly strange woman let me keep a bunch of furniture and boxes in her garage until I was ready to send for it (who WAS this person?? Her random kindness to me still sort of blows me away.)

-- I had had to reluctantly call the now-EX-boyfriend in San Francisco (who was already dating someone else - hence, the meltdown...) and ask him to pay for the repairs on the van. Which were going to be 600 bucks. Oh, it killed me to ask him - but he agreed to pay for it. He could afford it, he was making massive amounts of money and I was sitting in a room in Woodland Hills, nibbling on Pretzels for dinner.

-- Once the van was fixed, I put an ad in the paper for it - sold it almost immediately - and used that money to buy my plane ticket to Chicago.

-- Literally only a month later, I had found my own apartment on the shore of Lake Michigan, a tiny one-room apartment, but my own, my own place. I still had had leftovers from the sale of the Westfalia, and used it for the security deposit.

-- It took me about 4 months for my head to stop spinning, and for me to calm down.

The Westfalia was the last car I ever owned, and it was pretty crucial - for all of the reasons I just described. In the end, even though it was a huge pain in the ass, it allowed me to get out of LA as quickly as possible, and enabled me to get an apartment almost immediately.

However, I also should say - that the boyfriend was crucial as well. He didn't want to pay the repairs, but I basically told him he had to. And he did it for me. Without the van being repaired, I never could have sold it, and it would have been much more difficult to move to Chicago.

So I have him to thank as well. Moving to Chicago pretty much changed and saved my life.

Whenever I see pictures of the Westfalia, and my boyfriend and I, cooking over the fire, me with a bandana around my head, he pouring coffee, drying our clothes on a line we had strung up - whatever - I always end up thinking of Chicago. I think of me flipping out on that random busy intersection in Woodland Hills, I think of the kindly people who tried to calm me down, I think of how odd it was that during our whole trip we had no idea that we actually were breaking UP as we drove across the country, as opposed to starting a new life together in San Fran, and I think of my eventual escape to the Windy City.

It was a good van. It really was.

Balloon Hockey

Tim Blair, one of my favorite guys out there, has picked up on yesterday's "balloon" story, and states:

Twenty years from now, when Balloon Hockey is a major Olympic sport, Sheila O'Malley will be able to say: "I was there when it all began."

But you have to read all the comments. They are hysterical. People describe the random games they would play, at various offices, and physics labs, to pass the time.

I am still laughing about Tim's "Run Away from Gary" game.

I think men are great

and I will tell you why.

(Although I know people get really touchy about "blanket statements" of any kind ... There are always exceptions to every rule - I myself am an exception to many 'this is what women are like' rules - but still. I certainly can appreciate a moment like the one I am about to tell)

Someone had a birthday party at work, and there are balloons floating about on the floor. One wandered into our area. 4 of us work back here, 2 of us are women, and 2 are men. Everyone is very cool, I like them all.

The female co-worker and I started batting the balloon back and forth, as though we were at a volleyball game. It was all rather desultory, the two of us bored, talking to each other about other things, as we batted it back and forth.

Then the two guys got involved, and within literally THREE SECONDS, an entire game, with a complicated rule system emerged. A point-system blossomed forth, and disqualifications were discussed - all of this seemed to happen immediatley, like flowers opening up on speeded-up film. The game just MANIFESTED.

"Okay. So you have to stay seated in your chair. No standing. We have to kick the balloon back and forth."

"Yeah! Cool! And it's 2 points if you land it right on top of that plant."

"And it's 5 points if it goes all the way across the table."

"And you win the game if it lands on something sharp and it pops..."

"Yeah, cool! Okay - go!"

A structure was zip-zip-zip created, and then we were all off to the races.

We began to play this suddenly-created game with ferocity, kicking the balloon around, screaming out, "2 points!", "5 points!"

That alone is evidence of why I think men are so great. Please, women, I know that we create things, too, but I'm talking about basic Darwinian playground behavior here, and it was when the boys leapt into the fray that RULES appeared. My female co-worker and I would NEVER have just feverishly created rules and scoring and foul zones. It took the BOYS to come in and do that. And it was so funny, because we all immediately accepted the rules, no question.

"Oh, of course. 2 points if you get it there. Sure."

Once the game died down, I commented, "I absolutely love it that when the BOYS got involved, an entire scoring system was created from nothing."

We all just started laughing!

Playground behavior. Live from New York.

That Book List going about

I've seen it on a couple different blogs. I got it here. If you want to play, just post the list on your own site, putting the titles you have read in bold.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I thought I would be embarrassed, but it turns out I've read many. A couple of blanks in my reading list I need to rectify:

Eudora Welty. My dad gave me her collected stories for Christmas one year, and she was highly influential on many of my favorite writers (Nancy Lemann being one of them) - so I need to check it out.

I need to read War and Peace, but quite frankly, the time-commitment is daunting.

I've never read Faulkner. Go ahead. Heap scorn upon my brow.

I've also never read any George Eliot, although I am sure I would absolutely fall in LOVE with that woman. How could I not?

Questions to those of you who have read some of my un-bolded books:

-- What is the big deal with "Tom Jones"? I mean, honestly: tell me. What is the big deal. Should I read it? Can you recommend it?

-- Who the hell is Chinua Achebe?

-- I can tell you right now that I will probably never read The Last of the Mohicans and Don Quixote. Is this really bad?

-- Please talk to me about Ford Madox Ford. His name comes up all the time. Never read a word. Any good?

Update: And here is Dan's list. He adds his own spin to it: Which of these books do you Never plan to read?

Congratulations are in order

...to Mike Hendrix, of the essential Cold Fury - who has just passed the million unique visitors mark.

You deserve it!!

The first piece I read of Mike's, strangely enough, is his classic: Tough Chicks. If you haven't read it, all I can really say is: Go. Now. And read it. He gets it, man. Mike gets it.

I met Mike last year, when his band played at The Knitting Factory in Manhattan. That was where I met Mr. Lion, too. Mike's band rocked the house, and again - it was a situation where I danced for 2 hours straight. It was lunacy. (It was good, too, because I was wearing combat boots. Much easier dancing in those than stilettos, I can tell you.)

Mike, thanks for your writing. You're a gem.

I've told you before, and I'll tell you again - Your writing is so distinctive that even if you didn't sign your name, I feel that I would know it was you.

Like your elegy to Dee Dee Ramone.

And this one: Beethoven vs. Mozart.

And I believe I told you, that I think this is one of the best things you've ever written: New Orleans tale. Your description of the junior-high marching band is spectacular, brings tears to my eyes.

So anyway - congratulations again, Mike, and I'm looking forward to June, when you come up my way again, to rock the house. I'll have on my dancing shoes, most definitely!

Crowds and Power

I am continuing to read Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. I find that I can only read 3 or 4 pages at a time. (Dave J: For me, that was true with the Silmarillion too). The prose is so specific, every sentence has such weight, and what he calls up in my mind is so powerful - that if I read too much in one sitting, it all starts to blend together. I lose the sharpness of what is going on, what he describes.

He writes about crowd behavior - in every single permutation you can imagine. He leaves no stone unturned. I pretty much think about crowds in terms of either urban areas, or in terms of revolutions, and historical upheavals. Storming the Bastille, the Nazis, the genocide in Rwanda, countless other examples. The crowd mentality obviously plays a huge part in such events.

But Canetti uses a wide wide lens. He doesn't just focus on the "mobs" storming the palace gates. He talks about religion. He talks about the "crowd of the dead", which pretty much every society and every civilization has. The relationship that the living have with their ancestors. He talks about women and men. The symbiotic nature of these two crowds, and how - even in groups widely divergent and separated by continents - similar rituals evolve. He talks about religion a lot. He talks about war. The crowd mentality in wars.

I am now getting into what he calls "crowd symbols", a term made up by Canetti - He describes "crowd symbols" thus:

Crowd symbols is the name I give to collective units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds.

He has come up with 11 such symbols: Corn, rivers, forest, rain, wind, sand, fire, the sea, the heap, stone heaps, treasure. I'm just at the beginning of this section, but I can imagine that these crowd symbols become crucial later in the book. For example, Canetti briefly posits that we can fully understand the nation of Great Britain if we fully understand that their "crowd symbol" is the "sea". It is a certain kind of nation that would have the "sea" as its symbol, an island nation perhaps, an adventuring nation. Canetti goes deeper into the collective metaphors for all of these concrete objects, metaphors which are common to all humanity.

Canetti talks about such "symbols" as indicative of the different aspects of crowd behavior. Like: Rivers are like crowds as the crowds are gathering, as the crowd is converging, from many streams into one current. Rivers are relatively static, they rarely jump their banks and flood over, the way is clear, everyone is one, and the crowd is moving together as one.

Canetti makes an enormous distinction, by the way, between "crowds" and "packs". Packs have their own section. "Crowds" are a completely different phenomenon.

(See why I can only read a couple pages at a time?)

For those of you who are interested (and maybe I'm nuts, but this kind of shit is unbelievably fascinating to me), here is a brief excerpt, where Canetti describes the attributes of every crowd.

Every crowd has these attributes, only some in a more obvious way than others.

The Attributes of the Crowd
Before I try to undertake a classification of crowds it may be useful to summarize briefly their main attributes. The following four traits are important.

1. The crowd always wants to grow. There are no natural boundaries to its growth. Where such boundaries have been artificially created - e.g. in all institutions which are used for the preservation of closed crowds - an eruption of the crowd is always possible and will, in fact, happen from time to time. There are no institutions which can be absolutely relied on to prevent the growth of the crowd once and for all.

2. Within the crowd there is equality. This is absolute and indisputable and never questioned by the crowd itself. It is of fundamental importance and one might even define a crowd as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant. It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.

3. The crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense. Nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; everything must be the crowd itself. The feeling of density is strongest in the moment of discharge [Ed: This is the moment when, in Canetti's theory, a crowd actually coheres into a crowd. Once there was nothing, now there is a crowd. "Discharge" is the moment when that happens.] One day it may be possible to determine this density more accurately and even to measure it.

4. The crowd needs a direction It is in movement and it moves towards a goal. The direction, which is common to all its members, strengthens the feeling of equality. A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd. It's constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal. A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.

There is, however, another tendency hidden in the crowd, which appears to lead to new and superior kinds of formation. The nature of these is often not predictable.

Don't give me love - just make me laugh, please

Paul Newman was recently asked how he and Joanne Woodward have lasted so long, what was the secret to their long marriage.

His answer: "We have a lot of laughter, and a lot of lust."

Best. Answer. Ever.

I love that the word "love" is not mentioned. Not that I'm against "love" or anything, as an idea. I just dislike the word, and don't agree with it being used in any meaningful way as an emotion. I don't think of love as an emotion. I think of it more as an action, something that you DO. If I hook up with someone and you ask me why, I will probably not say, "Because I love them so much." That's not a reason. It's not real. (At least it's not for me.) Love isn't something that stands on its own. It actually is a stand-in word for other things: shared humor, passion for the same things, being able to talk to someone, feeling safe with someone, whatever.

But "love"? If ever there was an over-used word, it's "love".

Give me a lot of laughter, and a lot of lust - and I'd probably call that "love" too.

Trivia question

Now this is a bit up-for-debate. However - we're talking about expert consensus here:

What do military historians agree is the longest conventional war in the 20th century?

Conventional, conventional - 2 huge armies facing one another. No guerrilla stuff.

Ouch

Last night, I danced for four hours straight like a banshee from hell. (I was in a dance club. Thank God. It's not like I was just randomly dancing by myself on a street corner.) A friend of mine turned 40 yesterday, and a throng of us convened on this dance club which is a total bridge-and-tunnel hangout - the kind of place that plays songs like "It's Raining Men" and everyone LOSES their minds.

I was wearing stilettos though. I cannot describe to you the torture I feel today. My feet. My poor poor feet. They look helpless, vulnerable, and completely messed up.

But the dancing was great fun. Even though I'm paying for it today.

Oh, and happy birthday Sesame Street. You WERE my childhood.

The 1970s movie binge

... has begun. Now mind you, I've already seen half of these films. Because I love acting, and I love movies, and the 1970s were a high-water mark. Many of my favorite films were made then. They're what got me into acting in the first place.

But after reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, I'm going back to re-visit them all. I kept a list on the back pages of the book.

This morning I watched "Shampoo". I've always loved that movie. Watching it again was like running into an old friend. I mean, even the names on the credits give me a bit of a thrill. Hal Ashby, Robert Towne ...

And freakin' Julie Christie is just so damn wonderful. I love her. Getting trashed in her backless gown, at the uppity party celebrating Nixon's win, throwing olives at the back of her lover's head, getting completely out of control, in this totally glammed-out way.

So much has changed since then. I'm not just talking about in the world, I'm talking about movies.

There's barely a soundtrack in this film. I watch movies from the 70s, and realize: Wow. The soundtrack has completely taken over now. Soundtracks often come out before the movie opens. Sometimes it adds to the film (like in Pulp Fiction) and sometimes it's just a big ol' crutch. Directors now rely on the SOUNDTRACK to tell the audience how to feel, as opposed to figuring out a way to let the story do it. It's lame.

If you see the movies in the 50s, and 60s - there is always a very histrionic soundtrack. Like "Rebel without a Cause", which is, for all intents and purposes, a relatively realistic film - but there are these blaring moments of operatic music which tells you: Oh, okay, this film is not contemporary. That was the style back then.

The 70s took away all the crutches. Either you had a good story, or you did not. Most of the films were driven by characters, not plots. And barely any of those films have overdone soundtracks. Either the story is on the screen, or it is not.

I loved the lack of a soundtrack in "Shampoo". When they all end up at the wacked-out party with the strobe lights, and suddenly "Sgt. Pepper" is blaring, I realized: Damn, there's been no incidental music up until now. Nothing. Not even on the in-between scenes, where you see Warren Beatty racing from lover to lover to lover on his motorcycle. It's just real. You basically just see a man on a bike. There is no music cluing you in on what your emotions should be. "Oooh, he's nervous now." "Now he's mad." "Now he's horny."

No. You fill it all in yourself, because the story works on its own.

Goldie Hawn is wonderful. I loved the truth-telling scene between the two of them at the end. He's really a wonderful actor. I forget that sometimes. Because of the whole persona, and because he doesn't really act all that much anymore. But I've loved him since I saw "Splendor in the Grass" when I was ... 15 or something like that. He's got a natural-ness, every film he's in he somehow manages to make it look like a documentary.

And the political undertones of the film - it's 1968 ... It adds a level of gravitas to the whole thing. You can sense, even if many of the characters do not, that an era is ending.

And Julie Christie. I don't know if it's her acting that I love so much, or just her personality that shines through. It's like - you see her up there, you see this absolutely glamorous British woman - but her beauty seems casual, she doesn't really seem interested in it at all - You can't help but think of her as a real person.

The ending of the film is perfect. Because, of course, despite the fact that Beatty is running from woman to woman to woman, you are completely on his side - and YOU can see, even if he can't, that he has met his match in Julie Christie. (They were a real-life couple at the time as well).

The ending of the film is perfect because you are left sad for this man. You see his silhouette on the top of the hill, and suddenly - even though the rest of the movie occurs at a frenetic pace, and he seems like a madman, running from this to that, completely impulse-driven - but suddenly, seeing him up there - you feel his loneliness. You feel his sadness. Warren Beatty always managed to convey the sadness behind the womanizing maniac. He never seemed too pleased with himself - he always was able to convey the price such men pay. Without ever being self-pitying. I admire him for that.

I admire him for a lot of reasons, but I definitely admire him for his ability to put that rather negative aspect of his own personality up on screen. It's a rare quality. A lot of actors (most actors) protect their image, and always want to be right. They always want the audience to side with them. They are afraid of coming off as weak, or as flawed. That kind of acting does nothing for me, although it certainly has its place.

I prefer the flaws. I relate.

I can't help but notice the difference

between the train-crash in North Korea and the train-explosions in Madrid. Every report I read of the North Korean crash has contradictory information, contradictory numbers. Now thousands have been killed, now it's only 150. They want our help. There are no pictures available. There is no sense of what is really happening. You don't get the sense that anything actually IS happening. On Yahoo, there is merely a satellite photo of what the railway looks like from above (but the photo dates a year ago). It's now a day later, and still - all we get is one of those "this just in" maps, telling us where it has happened.

Normally, "this just in" maps signify: More to come, more details to come, hang on, hang on. We've had the same "This Just In" map up now for 24 hours.

Now, apparently, North Korea is asking for help. I'm no investigative journalist, I'm just a girl reading the headlines - but if they're asking for help, then I would imagine that the reality is 10 times worse than what is being reported.

And yet the people of North Korea - what of them?

When the bombs went off in Madrid, we saw the faces of the people in the city, we could share in their emotions, we could relate to them - because we could see them - Who cannot relate to someone who has just lost their son and husband? Who can't relate to the horror of cell phones going off in body bags? And what that actually means? On a human level?

North Korea is an invisible nation. They are under lock and key. Nothing gets in, and almost nothing gets out.

I guess what I am really aware of right now is an overwhelmingly LOUD silence.

And I remember the chatter-chatter-chatter not too long ago about the catastrophe in Madrid. People putting out information, embassies, consulates, we heard from Spanish bloggers, yap yap yap yap. The country was not closed - we could be with them in their moment of sorrow. There was a sense that we could communicate with the people of Madrid, we were all part of the same world.

Not so now.

Ryzsard Kapucinski has a great essay about the importance of listening to the "silence" in history. I'll let Kapucinski speak for himself:

People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence: at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.

What silence emanates from countries wiht overflowing prisons! In Somoza's Nicaragua -- silence; in Duvalier's Haiti -- silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice -- of complaint or protest or indignation -- disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante -- the state of silence...

Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult.

It would be interesting to research the media systems of the world to see how many service information and how many service silence and quiet. Is there more of what is said or of what is not said? One could calculate the number of people working in the publicity industry. What if you could calculate the number of people working in the silence industry? Which number would be greater?

"Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night"

I want to thank the reader who just randomly sent me one of the books on my Wish List ... That is SO sweet, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I appreciate that you all come here, and read what I write - and take the time to email me, or comment - and I love the surprise I get when a gift arrives.

It means much. Truly.

What book did he buy for me?

He bought me a book entitled All About "All About Eve". The tagline is: "The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!" (The title of this post is the most famous line from the film - Bette Davis at the foot of the stairs, surveying the room with those cold bizarre eyes, and snarling out the words...)

Oh GOD. I LOVE books like this.

I read an excerpt from this book in a "Vanity Fair" a while back. All About Eve is notorious for many reasons, not just because the stars were all either fighting or fucking their way through the whole shoot - it's not just notorious because Mankeiwicz (the director) gave a young Marilyn Monroe her first speaking role in the film - it's not just notorious because of the on-set romances, the career fluctuations, the entire lifeforce that is Bette Davis -

It's notorious for all of these reasons, yes, but it's also "notorious" because despite all of that venom, and all the extraneous real-life drama, they ended up making an absolutely classic film.

Watching it, you literally cannot imagine it any other way. It has the indelible mark of truth. It is impossible to imagine that film without Bette Davis, without the script, with anything being changed. It's also a kind of art-imitating-life scenario - because Davis plays an aging actress, Margo Channing, filled with jealousy towards an up-and-coming sycophantic young actress rival. Davis' anxiety about growing older, about losing her edge - and yet her rock-solid practicality (she would rather keep making pictures into her 80s, rather than base her career on youthful looks) makes Margo one of the most riveting characters I have ever seen.

Can't WAIT to read this book.

Thank you, dear reader. Your kind gesture has made my day!

Roger Ebert has put All About Eve on his "Greatest Movies Ever Made" List. Here is his review, if you're interested:

Growing older was a smart career move for Bette Davis, whose personality was adult, hard-edged and knowing. Never entirely comfortable as an ingenue, she was glorious as a professional woman, a survivor, or a bitchy predator. Her veteran actress Margo Channing in "All About Eve" (1950) was her greatest role; it seems to show her defeated by the wiles of a younger actress, but in fact marks a victory: the triumph of personality and will over the superficial power of beauty. She never played a more autobiographical role.

Davis' performance as a star growing older is always paired with another famous 1950 performance--Gloria Swanson's aging silent star in "Sunset Boulevard." Both were nominated for best actress, but neither won; the Oscar went to Judy Holiday for "Born Yesterday," although Davis' fans claimed she would have won if her vote hadn't been split, ironically, by Anne Baxter, who plays her rival and was also nominated for best actress.

When you compare the performances by Davis and Swanson, you see different approaches to similar material. Both play great stars, now aging. Davis plays Margo Channing realistically, while Swanson plays Norma Desmond as a gothic waxwork. "Sunset Boulevard" seems like the better film today, maybe because it fits our age of irony, maybe because Billy Wilder was a better director than Joseph Mankiewicz. But Davis' performance is stronger than Swanson's, because it's less mad and more touching. Davis was a character, an icon with a grand style, so even her excesses are realistic.

The movie, written by Mankiewicz, begins like "Sunset Boulevard" with a narration by a writer--the theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), bemused, cynical, manipulative. He surveys the room at a theatrical awards dinner, notes the trophy reserved for Eve Harrington (Baxter), and describes the survivors of Eve's savage climb to the top: her director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), her writer Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), Lloyd's wife Karen (Celeste Holm), who was her greatest supporter. And the idol she cannibalized, Margo. As the fatuous old emcee praises Eve's greatness, the faces of these people reflect a different story.

The movie creates Margo Channing as a particular person, and Eve Harrington as a type. Eve is a breathless fan, eyes brimming with phony sincerity. She worms her way into Margo's inner circle, becoming her secretary, then her understudy, then her rival. Faking humility and pathos is her greatest role, and at first only one person sees through it: crusty old Birdie (Thelma Ritter), Margo's wardrobe woman. "What a story!" she snaps. "Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."

Margo believes Eve's story of hard luck and adoration; no actor has much trouble believing others would want to devote their lives to them. Good, sweet Karen also sympathizes with the girl, and arranges to strand Margo in the country one weekend so that Eve can go on as her understudy. Karen is repaid when Eve tries to steal her playwright husband, after an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to steal Margo's fiance, Bill. He is played by Merrill (Davis' real-life husband), who turns her away with a merciless put-down: "What I go after, I want to go after. I don't want it to come after me."

Eve is a universal type. Margo plays at having an ego but is in love with her work--a professional, not an exhibitionist. She's the real thing. But the sardonic tone of the film is set by Sanders, as DeWitt. He's the principal narrator, and with his cigarette holder, his slicked-down hair and his flawless evening dress, he sees everything with deep cynicism. He has his own agenda; while Eve naively tries to steal the men who belong to the women who helped her, Addison calmly schemes to keep Eve as his own possession. Sanders, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor, lashes her in one of the movie's most savage speeches: "Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on? That you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?" And: "I am nobody's fool. Least of all, yours."

Glittering in the center of "All About Eve" is a brief supporting appearance by Marilyn Monroe. This film, and John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" earlier the same year, put her on the map; she was already "Marilyn Monroe," in every detail. She appears at Margo's party as DeWitt's date, and he steers her toward the ugly but powerful producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff), advising her, "Now go and do yourself some good." Monroe sighs, "Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?"

It has been observed that no matter how a scene was lighted, Monroe had the quality of drawing all the light to herself. In her brief scenes here, surrounded by actors much more experienced, she is all we can look at. Do we see her through the prism of her legend? Perhaps not; those who saw the movie in 1950, when she was unknown, also singled her out. Mankiewicz helped create her screen persona when he wrote this exchange after the Monroe character sees Margo's fur coat.

"Now there's something a girl could make sacrifices for," Monroe says.

"And probably has," says the director.

"Sable," Monroe explains.

"Sable?" asks the producer. "Did she say sable or Gable?"

Monroe replies: "Either one."

If Monroe steals her own scenes, the party sequence contains Davis' best work in the movie, beginning with her famous line, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night." Drinking too much, disillusioned by Eve's betrayal, depressed by her 40th birthday, she says admitting her age makes her "feel as if I've taken all my clothes off." She looks at Bill and bitterly says: "Bill's 32. He looks 32. He looked it five years ago. He'll look it 20 years from now. I hate men."

It was believed at the time that Davis' performance as Margo was inspired by Tallulah Bankhead. "Tallulah, understandably enough, did little to dispel the assumption," Mankiewicz tells Gary Carey in the book More About All About Eve. "On the contrary, she exploited it to the hilt with great skill and gusto." Press agents manufactured a feud between Davis and Bankhead, but Mankiewicz says neither he nor Davis was thinking of Bankhead when the movie was made. Davis could have found all the necessary inspiration from her own life.

Davis smokes all through the movie. In an age when stars used cigarettes as props, she doesn't smoke as behavior, or to express her moods, but because she wants to. The smoking is invaluable in setting her apart from others, separate from their support and needs; she is often seen within a cloud of smoke, which seems like her charisma made visible.

The movie's strength and weakness is Anne Baxter, whose Eve lacks the presence to be a plausible rival to Margo, but is convincing as the scheming fan. When Eve understudies for Margo and gets great reviews, Mankiewicz wisely never shows us her performance; better to imagine it, and focus on the girl whose look is a little too intense, whose eyes a little too focused, whose modesty is somehow suspect.

Mankiewicz (1909-1993) came from a family of writers; his brother Herman wrote "Citizen Kane." He won back-to-back Oscars for writing and directing "A Letter to Three Wives" in 1949 and "All About Eve" in 1950, and is also remembered for "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1947), "The Barefoot Contessa" (1954) and "Guys and Dolls" (1955). He remained sharp-tongued all of his days. When "All About Eve" was recycled into the Broadway musical "Applause," Mankiewicz observed that the studio had received "infinitely more" in royalties than it paid him for writing and directing the film. He said he had no complaints. The reason they have the "no refunds" sign in the theater ticket window, he said, is to keep the rubes from calling the cops.

Diary Friday

An entry from my sophomore year in high school. I read my prose, and I don't know whether to laugh or burn up the pages. I am so dramatic. Thank God I've calmed down in my old age. (Yeah, right.)

Oh, and as always with these adolescent writings - I cannot help but interject snarky comments.

It's a self-protective measure.

January

Oh, I went to CCD today [Ed: I can't remember what that stands for. I know that it means "Sunday school". Beth?], and after I walked over to church alone. It was really windy, and freezing, and I was 20 minutes early, so everything was still and the church parking lot was quiet.

A.W., my former love [Ed: This is extremely dramatic language. We had huge crushes on each other in the 6th grade. That's it. He was the one who gave me the "spitball valentine" - Okay, onward:], I still secretly adore him, with all my heart, [Ed: Okay, Sheila. Got it.] was sauntering along in front of me. Then he turned and called out to me. I ran up to him. It is so odd that I love JW so intensely [Ed: Who? I have no idea who "JW" is. So much for the intensity of my love], but I can still feel my heart pound when AW talks to me. Anyway, we walked into church together. It was so funny - we talked about our service projects we have to do, and how neither of us had started ours. I love how he laughs. He's got a lopsided grin. I also love that he called out to me. I still haven't forgotten 6th grade, which I fondly call "The Andrew Year". [Ed: Oh God, I am such a geek.] I have liked AW for about 5 years now. Since we were kids. [Ed: Uhm, you still are a kid.] I know I don't have a chance with him now, though, because he's so popular, and I'm not. 6th grade was a long time ago. But I still want him as a friend.

Oh, forgot to tell about this: THE PLAY THAT I WROTE FOR DRAMA WAS PICKED TO ENTER THE CONTEST! [Please stop screaming, Sheila.] I can NOT believe it. I thought it was sappy. I still do. All the people do in it is cry and feel sorry for themselves. But it was picked anyway. I don't really know what you get if you win, but I doubt I'll win. I think it goes over the 30 minute time limit anyway. I mean, it's 17 pages long!

My letter from Dee should arrive any day now. Oh, I love the feeling when I've made a new friend! [Ed: Dee ended up being a psycho. Maybe I'll tell the sordid tale someday.]

I am now deeply immersed in The Poseidon Adventure. I honestly believe that if I had a form which asked "Favorite Author", Paul Gallico would be mine. [Ed: Wow, I had completely forgotten how obsessed I was with Gallico.] Some of his writing is grotesque, scary, morbid, and this particular book of his is a test of courage of a bunch of unlikely people tossed together in a life-and-death situation. It actually is a test of my own courage to read it. I believe that Paul Gallico wrote this book for a purpose: to get the reader thinking: Oh God, could I survive such a thing? Would I stay sane? What would I do? Would I be one of the generous ones, helping others? Or would I turn into one of the selfish ones, only wanting to save myself? At times, reading it, I feel depressed and ashamed of my weakness and my flimsy personality, because I know that I could not endure what those people went through without committing suicide or something. But I do know, that I would feel hope as well, and not just see darkness, death, and destruction around me, but also see the end of the nightmare and see to the time when we were saved. If I let my hope go, then I really would die. Somehow, I feel, after a lot of serious thought on this, and on myself, that instead of thinking, "Oh God, the end of me is near," I would be thinking, "I can't wait until I get out of here." I don't know how I know this, but I have always been optimistic. I think that it is about my favorite trait of mine. And I admit, there aren't many likable traits. I am selfish, mean sometimes, I fume and rage, and I never tell anyone what's wrong, but in the end I can always see the sun, or the joke. Like, if I find myself in a miserable, awful, embarrassing, frustrating, totally disagreeable situation, I just keep thinking: "I WILL LIVE THROUGH THIS. I WILL NOT DIE". And it honestly helps. So does thinking about Anne Frank and how she said, "I still believe people are good in their hearts."

I am my own psychiatrist. Although I am miserable now, and I feel terrible, the sun will come up tomorrow, and life will go on, and I will feel love and happiness and success. I think this is really what keeps me going, what boosts me up, even when I feel like giving up.

"April hath put a spirit of youth in everything."

So sayeth the Bard, whose birthday is (supposedly) today. Nobody really knows when he was born, but April 23 is the date you most often see. April 23, 1564.

Came across a very fun article which lets you know only a couple of the phrases (and words) invented (or co-opted) by Shakespeare :

• Eaten out of house and home
• Pomp and circumstance
• Foregone conclusion
• Full circle
• The makings of
• Method in the madness
• Neither rhyme nor reason
• One fell swoop
• Seen better days
• It smells to heaven
• A sorry sight
• A spotless reputation
• Strange bedfellows
• The world's (my) oyster

Pretty cool.

And don't forget:

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Thanks, Bill, for achieving such greatness. Or maybe you were born to it. Or maybe it was thrust upon you. Or maybe Chris Marlowe wrote all the plays, and you just get all the credit. Who knows. But thanks anyway. And happy birthday.

Astounding

I know you've probably all seen this picture, but still, I wanted to post it. I can't get over it.

And here's the article about this gargantuan ship visiting our fair city.

I think it's doing a turn around the Statue of Liberty on Sunday (word on the street says so, that is). My friend Allison and I are going to be down in Battery Park, so I will see if I can get some shots.

If you turn the ship on its end, it would be taller than the Chrysler Building. I am looking out my office window right now at the Chrysler Building. Difficult to contemplate!

Scorn me not

But once upon a time I loved Michael Jackson.

I owned Thriller. I owned Off the Wall. I thought his videos were the coolest things I had ever seen. I grew up in the 80s.

However, I have not loved Michael Jackson for a long long time now.

I think the tide began to turn for me around the time when that video came out which was like a fascist's-in-training fantasy. Anyone remember that? The one with Michael in bright red military garb and mirrored Qaddafi-esque sunglasses, heading up the identical-looking robotic troops, the unveiling of the 30-story high statue of Michael, with helicopters flying between the statue's legs.

When I saw that (whenever that was) I remember thinking: "Huh. That's ... how you say ... a bit loony."

Huge egos are to be expected in that industry, but ... a fascistic fantasy of taking over the world?

It's a bit much, dude. Tone it down.

And the face-shifting maneuvers, and the FIRST scandal with kids sleeping in his bed, and the huge settlement paid out, and then his utterly bizarre stunt against Tommy Mottola a couple years ago, parading through New York holding up signs of Mottola as a devil, and the baby-dangling nightmare, and the unbelievably revealing documentary that came out last year ...

I mean, the man is a lunatic.

And to top it all off ... his music sucks, too. And it has for a long while. It's over.

On MULTIPLE levels.

Michael Jackson has been indicted by a grand jury. I say it's about time.

I look at the almost-inhuman sculpted planes of that strange face, and I remember the jolly kid with the Afro, wearing a tux, and think: Huh? What the hell....?

For those of you who always thought he was a freak, or for those of you who hate his music - you will not get this post at all.

But I have extremely fond and personal memories tied up with some of his songs. He was a huge part of my life in high school, and my first couple of years of college - so watching him self-destruct has been vaguely upsetting. And enraging, as well.

Spoke with my friend Mitchell today who told me about Chris Rock's comments on the issue - something along the lines of: "Dude, we gave you a pass on that first kid. You got a pass. And now you are GOIN' DOWN."

Looks that way.

But Mitchell and I did have a brief moment of nostalgia - for one of our favorite memories in our friendship. Having to do with a Michael Jackson song. For about one semester in college, Mitchell and I were not speaking to one another, for various ridiculous reasons- we now refer to it as "the Bad Time". We were BEST friends, and yet we did not speak for 4 months.

There was this frozen rage between us. (It's so funny to think of now, but at the time it was deadly serious.)

We were doing a show, and once - before rehearsal - he and I found ourselves alone in the men's dressing room - which is a long concrete room, with showers, lockers, and a long line of makeup mirrors down the middle. Nobody else was around, everyone left us alone (the tension so huge you could smell it in the air, like ozone) - and we sat there, tensely, quietly, not knowing what to say. Mitchell, to break the mood, turned on the boom box. We were all very into Michael Jackson's album "Bad" at the time. It was all we listened to.

"Man in the Mirror" came on.

And without discussing it, without a word between us, without a noticeable thawing in the air or anything - Mitchell and I started dancing to that song, dancing until we were completely lost in it. It was one of those times when you become completely unself-conscious. You completely lose awareness of yourself as a body taking up space - it is like you become your spirit. That was what that 3 minutes was like for us, in the dressing room. We danced separately from one another - he on one side of the line of makeup mirrors, me on the other side - We were both in these transcendent Private Idahos - I'll never forget it.

We were so separated. And yet so together.

When the song ended, we turned the tape deck off, realizing that we both had kind of "been" somewhere.

The frozen silence between us had broken. There would be no more "bad time". Somehow, through these weird separate dances, Mitchell and I forgave each other. Without saying a word. We found joy again. Joy in being together. Through the course of the song, all bitterness dissolved. Disappeared into thin air.

Anyway. It is about time that justice is done, as far as this out-of-control celebrity is concerned. Like Chris Rock said - he got a free pass before. And that ain't right.

But still:

I am grateful to him for that song. Always will be.

I cherish that memory with my friend Mitchell, dancing like whirling dervishes, looking at our reflections in the line of mirrors, forgiving each other. Silently. Joyously. Every time I hear that song, I think of that room, the grey walls, the reflections, the makeup lights, and Mitchell.

Horrible

The explosion in North Korea.

Yeah, so you have a massive explosion, where thousands are killed - and what is one of the first things done by the so-called government? Cut the international phone lines.

You know what? Some people are just evil mo-fos, and that's all there is to it.

Evil.

It's the final image in the article which I cannot get out of my mind:

"Reuters reported that residents of Pyongyang reached by telephone had said that there was nothing unusual in the capital. North Korean television was broadcasting military songs and music — standard evening fare."

Those poor people, living trapped in that country.

I'll be there Eire Long

It's official. Going to Ireland in November. I'll be there for my birthday.

I was there for my birthday once before. Holy shite, I'm old. My sisters and I were all there together - Siobhan was in school at UCD, and Jean and I traveled to visit.

The hilarity that ensued that week is difficult to describe. Pretty much the entire vacation has a "Had to be there" clause attached to it.

And the laughter? The laughter was intense.

We spent my birthday traveling to look at the pre-Stone Henge spirals of New Grange, on a grey rainy day.

Here is my imitation of what it is like to take a tour at New Grange:

You follow the tour-guide up the narrow inclining-passageway in the tomb. The rocks around you are literally covered in carved spirals.

Random person: So what do the spirals signify?
Tour guide: (Irish brogue) Well, we don't really know.

You get into the tomb area, where on the Solstice - if it is sunny - the light crawls up the narrow passage, and floods the inner tomb with light. In the tomb, on the sides, there are these large rounded-out stones - like platforms, or tables, or ... who the hell knows what.

Random person: What are these large stones for?
Tour guide: Nobody really knows.
Another random person: Do they think that it was a burial site? Or ...
Tour guide: Your guess is as good as mine.

It is HILARIOUS. If you ever go to New Grange, I highly suggest you take the tour, because basically the message is: "Nobody knows anything about this place, but isn't it just feckin' amazing???"

And it is.

The night of my birthday, my sisters and I went out and saw a play, and then huddled together in a Dublin nightclub, drinking beers, and screaming at each other over the music. Jean had bought a bodhran earlier the day, and we didn't have time to go back to the dorm and drop it off, so she was forced to bring the bodhran into the club. This mortified her.

"I look like such a tourist. I can't believe I'm bringing an Irish drum into a nightclub in Dublin. I hope no one asks about it."

The entire week was one long laugh-fest. And it all ended, gloriously, with "the night the lights went out in Dublin". One of the funnest and funniest nights I have ever had in my life.

I was there for the millennium as well - and now I'm going back. This November.

Ezra Pound fans - help me out

"Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose." -- Ezra Pound

Now: Do I have any Pound fans out there?

I know Pound through his reputation for being extremely generous and supportive of up-and-coming artists - he was like a relentless bull-dog manager for people he thought were talented. He had a very controversial life. (Or, huge chunks of it were controversial) I know that he defended fascism, and was very much anti-war. When World War II broke out he was arrested in Rome and incarcerated. I also know that he pled insanity and was locked up in a mental institution in the US for over 10 years. I believe he was paraded in a cage through the streets of Italy.

But besides all of that - I know that he was instrumental in nurturing young up-and-coming poets and authors (not even nurturing - more like bullying other people to read the works of the likes of Joyce and Eliot...He was their first champions)

But I don't know much about his actual poems. Who he was as a writer.

Is anyone out there a Pound fan? Who can start me in the right direction? What should I read? The "Cantos"?

I fully admit that I am intimidated by Ezra Pound, and I don't know where to start.

Sheer COMEDY

Are you all aware of Craig's List? Craig's List is how I found my kick-ass apartment. Anyway, they also post reader essays, and the following essay is literally one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life.

Just succumb.

Don't try to fight it. (Oh, and the piece is definitely work-safe, but the title kind of isn't. You can just scroll down to hide the title if it's a problem. Consider yourself warned, and like I said - just succumb. You won't be sorry. I have been crying with laughter at my desk.)

I am strangely proud and yet absolutely horrified...

that I am #1 and #2 on Google if you search the words "angry clowns".

What have I become.

The funniest thing is that it leads you to a post I wrote a while back about my friend Beth, who dressed up as a clown for Halloween in college, and ended up bitching out some guys who spilled beer on my kitchen floor. In full clown-makeup.

Psychological profile of Columbine Killers

An extremely interesting and in-depth article about the Columbine killers.

A couple things I want to say before you comment (should you feel like commenting):

There are those of you out there who have no interest in knowing "why" a certain killer/terrorist/whatever does what he does. You think that that is indicative of shuffling off responsibility, and trying to find a "root cause" to put all the blame on.

But from my point of view - (and maybe it's the actress side of me, the writer, the person who wants to get inside other people's heads):

"Why" is THE question to ask. Not to get rid of blame, not to look for someone to blame OTHER than the killers themselves, but to ask "why" because it's freaking FASCINATING, that's why.

Here are a list of freaky fuck-ups I am fascinated by - the people I always want to know more about:

-- Charles Manson
-- Jeffrey McDonald (the Green Beret who murdered his family)
-- Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Leslie Van Houten (the Manson killers)
-- Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
-- StalinStalin
-- Hitler
-- The Red Guards
-- Any mass murderer, in general
-- The Menendez brothers - I'm fascinated by them
-- Ted Bundy
-- David Berkowitz
-- Idi Amin
-- David Koresh
-- Jim Jones

I don't ever want to meet any of these people, ever, but I want to get inside their heads. See how they see things.

What drives someone to be a dictator? What drives a postal worker to start shooting his co-workers?

I am already anticipating many of you saying, "Who cares why? Does that mean they shouldn't be punished?"

You are mis-reading me if that is your response.

(I am thinking of one exchange I had with a couple of you about Goldstein, the guy who blew away the Muslim worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I wanted to know what his affiliation was, how his beliefs were formed, and I was met with: "He's a terrorist fuckhead, that's what he is." End of story. See, to me, that is just the beginning.)

I know the "I was a victim" defense is completely out of control in this country, with McDonalds being blamed for the fact that many of us are big fat fatty fats. That's ridiculous. I am not against personal responsibility.

But cults/totalitarian societies/control-freaks in charge of large groups of people/religious fanatics and psycho/sociopaths are HUGE passions of mine. Just because.

Some of you like to collect stamps. Some of you are fascinated by outer space. I am fascinated by the psychology of mass murderers.

What does it feel like to be brainwashed? What does it actually FEEL like inside a psychopath's head? How does he/she perceive the world? What exactly is a psychopath? How is it different from a sociopath? Etc.

It's part of the reason why this website is so hypnotic to me (I am apparently brainwashed by a website devoted to cults - not a good sign!)

I'm just going on and on like this because I want to explain where I am coming from, and I really don't want to get into any exchanges like: "Harris and Klebold were murderers! And THAT'S IT."

Maybe that's it for you, but it's not for me.

For example, from the article about Harris and Klebold:

In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by Slate for this story*.) "Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.

And:

Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)

None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.

See, to me, that's what I really want to know. In my curious bones. What is it like to not comprehend love or hate or fear? Are people born that way? Are people born lacking certain emotions? Or - do they lose the ability to feel certain things after terrible events, or total rejection? Was Jeffrey Dahmer born without compassion? Killing animals as a small child is a clue, but did he have moments of regret, compunction? Was violence absolutely irresistible to him? Like someone else being addicted to porn, or gambling or whatever? Like: I wish I didn't feel the NEED to kill things, but it is irresistible...

These are things I like to contemplate. Cheery, eh?

More discoveries in regards to the psychologies of the Columbine killers follow.

(found Slate article via Cut on the Bias)

Reunion of complete strangers

During the playoffs last year, I was watching one of the games surrounded by a sea of hostile Yankee fans. (This is at a bar in Hoboken, I love going there to watch games and such because of the sizes of the TVs and it's a bit off the beaten track). However, it is most definitely Yankee territory.

Here is my comment from last year on the pros and cons of this venue.

One night last year I saw 5 lonely men wearing Red Sox caps, surrounded by what seemed like 4,897 Yankee fans. I walked over, we struck up a conversation, we watched the game together, we became life-long friends. (For the evening, anyway. I promptly forgot about all of them the second I left.)

It was just one of those things. They welcomed me into their group. And we won that night, as I recall. Which was hilarious. My cell phone ringing off the hook, their cell phones were ringing off the hook - it was great fun.

Anyway - last night, I stopped by to this same venue after work to catch some of the game. (I don't have TV at my house. I'm a loser.) It's too early in the season for the bar to be crowded. Half the people in the joint were actually there for the hockey game on 3 of the TVs.

But anyway. I sat at the bar, facing a massive television - and within ten minutes, 5 guys came in and crowded into 5 stools next to me. They were rowdy, obviously good friends, smoking, drinking, talking on their cell phones, discussing the game. Within 1.3 seconds, I could tell that they were Red Sox fans.

I glanced over, one of them glanced at me - and instantly - we all recognized one another. It was as though we were long-lost friends. And there we all were, meeting up randomly in the very spot where we had originally met and become life-long friends. We were complete strangers, having a rapturous reunion.

"HEY!"

"You're that girl from last year!"

"We remember you!" (I loved that. The collective "we".)

"I was the guy who got in the fight - member me?" I did remember. Some Yankee fan had punched him in the face because of his Red Sox cap. Or maybe because of something else, maybe Red Sox fan stepped on Yankee fan's foot, but the Red Sox cap had begun the scuffle.

I said, "Oh yeah! I remember the guy punching you in the face!" I said this enthusiastically, and happily, as though I were saying, "I remember that you opened the door for me."

There was a brief pause.

He said, "Yeah, but you should have seen the other guy."

Which was rather amusing, because I had seen the other guy - who had basically knocked Red Sox fan onto the ground, and walked away unscathed.

Funny. A little face-saving moment on his part.

Oh, forgot to mention this: I asked one of them, "So are you from Boston?"

He said, "No. Southern California."

I said, "Then why on earth..."

He said, "Because I enjoy the torture, I enjoy being dejected, and I enjoy the brief moments of happiness."

That is word for word what he said.

On The Last Picture Show

A couple of excerpts from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about the film "The Last Picture Show", directed by Peter Bogdanovich (this is for you, MikeR):

Now that "The Last Picture Show" was happening, Bogdanovich finally got around to reading the book. He realized, to his chagrin, that it had less to do with the last picture show, or the end of movies, than with the coming of age in the early '50s - in a godforsaken, desolate Texas town, yet. The story revolved around the friendship between two young men, Duane, a charming roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks, and Sonny, the good boy trying to find his place in the world, and the damage inflicted on both of them by the rich, bored, Anarene femme fatale, Jacy Farrow. Thrown into this mix is Sam the Lion, the elderly proprietor of the pool hall and run-down movie theater. Sam, rolling cigarettes and telling stories, is the sole repository of decency in the town, and when he dies, suddenly, of a stroke, it all goes to hell. As Sonny puts it, "Nothing's really been right since Sam the Lion died."

Peter was in a funk. He was a New York boy; what did he know from small towns in Texas? Polly [Peter's wife and business partner and artistic alter ego] liked the book because it could have been her, had she grown up in the Midwest instead of Europe ...

Just as Beatty and [Arthur] Penn, Benton and Newman saw "Bonnie and Clyde" as a French treatment of American themes, Peter and Polly saw that by 1969, in Polly's words, at last it might be possible to "make the book in America the way the French would have made it, where these weird American sexual mores could be investigated." [The French New Wave cinema set off a firestorm of imitation and envy in this country - Truffaut, Godard - these were the real innovators - they were the inspiration for Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Scorsese, DeNiro - all the new generation.]

Bogdanovich wanted to shoot in black and white, thought it would convey period better than color, but it was unheard of.

I can't imagine that film in color. It would just be wrong.

And then the film opened.

It is easy to see why people were impressed. In an era of gaudy color, it was shot in a restrained black and white, had a spare, dusty look, Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans set in motion, or better, from Peter's point of view, Ford in his "Grapes of Wrath" period. And yet, as Platt [Bogdanovich's wife - whom he dumped during filming, dumped her for Cybill Shepherd] intended, it delivered a European frankness that was new to the American screen and even more unusual in this Dustbowl setting: Sonny and his girlfriend listlessly making out in the front seat of a truck, her bra hanging from the rearview mirror, a casual shot of her bare breasts, just there, a fact of life, like the dry tumbleweed visible through the windshield...

But Picture Show has a lot more to offer than mere titillation. Everything works, looks, and sounds just right. Tim Bottoms is splendid as Sonny, tentative and goofy-looking, fumbling through the last years of adolescence toward adulthood, eyes sorrowful beneath a mop of tangled hair and blinking as if he's just been hatched, trying to navigate the strange world of adults. Ditto [Cybill] Shepherd, as Bogdanovich instantly understood, perfect at tearing the wings off the boys, self-absorbed, thoughtless, and tempting, a blond lollipop. And the others, Burstyn as her bored mother, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage having once traded wealth for happiness, overwhelmed by melancholy, the feeling of life passing her by ...

The last shot is the one that remains in memory: the desolate main street of Anarene, emptied of people, the wind howling, leaves and bits of debris whipped through the air. It's as powerful an image of alienation and loss as anything in Antonioni...

"The Last Picture Show" was about the end of an era of motion pictures...It was a hit, and a critics' darling as well. As Peter sensed when he approached the project, coming of age in a small town in Texas was not something he knew much about. Not only had he grown up in New York, he had never even come of age, being one of those children who struck people as premature adults. But he had succeeded in making the material his own, if only by throwing himself headlong into an adolescent affair with Cybill that provoked the jealousy of Bottoms and [Jeff] Bridges, mimicking the mechanics of the plot. As [Bert] Schneider and [Bob] Rafaelson [the producers] had recognized, Bogdanovich was aesthetically, at least, quite conservative.

Scorsese put it this way: "The last person to make classical American cinema was Peter. To really utilize the wide frame and the use of the deep focal length. He really understood it."

In contrast to authority-bashing, adult-baiting pictures like "Bonnie and Clyde", "Easy Rider", and MASH, "The Last Picture Show" is reverential toward its patriarchy, Ben Johnson's Sam the Lion, who is the film's teacher, law-giver, fount of values.

When he dies, an era ends, just as surely as it does in Ford's elegiac "Liberty Valance".

To Movie-Lovers:

I am in the process of reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind. My friend Allison has been talking about it to me for a couple of weeks now - and leaving me messages about it, messages of increasing feverishness, until I finally thought that she was going to go out and buy the damn book for me - so we could discuss it. I started to read it a couple of days ago, and I am tearing through it.

The book is the story of Hollywood and the American film-making revolution that happened in the 1970s. (Well, Hollywood isn't quite accurate, because there was a huge coastal swing towards filming in New York in the 70s: Woody Allen, Scorsese - Coppola insisting on filming "The Godfather" in New York, stuff like that, Sidney Lumet's films...)

Something major happened to the movies we made in this country during that decade - and this book looks at all of the factors (and the personalities) which allowed this to happen. It is exhaustively researched, and filled with quotes from such luminaries as Spielberg, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola (Biskind is the former executive editor of "Premiere" so he obviously has access to these high-level people, willing to talk about that crazy decade). Even more interesting, are these massive producers and directors who never really made it out of that decade, for various self-destructive reasons.

Biskind gives you an insider's look at the whole "Easy Rider" phenomenon, which was one of the first films to launch this "New Hollywood", although "Bonnie and Clyde" certainly hinted at what was to come.

Reading this book, I can't help but think: "It is absolutely astonishing that Dennis Hopper is still alive."

That man sounded like such a LUNATIC. I met him about 6 years ago, and he was completely clean and sober - very articulate - and basically just a big love-ball. He loves acting, he makes fun of himself, he has seen every movie ever made ...

I cannot reconcile the man I met with the RAGING LUNATIC in the book. Of course, he was on major major drugs for about 15 years - raging out of control - until finally nobody would hire him, and he sank into total obscurity for many many years.

David Lynch helped revive his career with "Blue Velvet". [Update: This is incorrect. I forgot about the movie which gave him the jump-start: "River's Edge". Which I remember seeing in the movie theatre, way back when. There's a final scene in a hospital, when Hopper gives an interview, and he is clearly mad - I mean, insane - and I remember the press Hopper started getting again, like: Woah. Dennis Hopper was GREAT once, wasn't he? "Blue Velvet" came after that] "Hoosiers" came along at the same time. All 3 films came out in 1986. It was a very big year for Dennis Hopper. And then there was that great GREAT scene with Christopher Walken in Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott's "True Romance" (one of my favorite scenes of all time)

Anyway. He survived! He survived what he did to himself!

He's one of the lucky ones. Many of the characters in this book (men who once ran Hollywood - Robert Evans, Bert Schneider, and others) were ruined. By drug addiction, financial irresponsibility, insane scandals - and yet at the same time, these men (like Evans, who brought us the Godfather movies, who brought us Chinatown - and like Schneider who was responsible for Easy Rider and others) - were breaking new ground in film, these men were taking the power out of the studios, and handing it to talented new young directors.

Like the 25 year old Spielberg, directing "Jaws". "Jaws" which is generally seen as the first "summer blockbuster". "Jaws" changed how movies are marketed, "Jaws" created the landscape we live in now.

It's a very VERY interesting book.

I am keeping a list on the back pages of movies I either need to see for the first time or ones I need to re-watch.

This book makes you HUNGRY to see movies.

"Last Picture Show". Need to see it again. I will never forget the first time I saw this film. It kind of is without a peer. Peter Bogdonavich never came close to that accomplishment again, although he will ALWAYS have my undying love for directing one of the goofiest and funniest movies ever made: "What's Up, Doc".

"Five Easy Pieces" - only seen parts of it - that famous scene of Jack Nicholson giving the waitress a hard time, when he's ordering a sandwich. It makes me laugh every time I see it. Need to see the whole movie.

"Chinatown" - Time to rent that baby again. Amazing movie.

"Carnal Knowledge" - I am ashamed to admit I have only seen parts of it, even though I love everyone involved. Nicholson, Mike Nichols ... Ann Margaret, for God's sake!

"Days of Heaven" - Never seen it. Although parts of it are featured in that great documentary about cinematographers called "Visions of Light". The images created in this film are absolutely unbelievable. A work of art, really.

I need to see "Bonnie and Clyde" again.

I saw "Dog Day Afternoon" when I was 12 years old, babysitting. I was WAYYYY too young to see it. But I can honestly say that that film was a life-changing experience. One day I was one way, the next day everything seemed different, because of that movie. I realized I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be like Al Pacino. It was a moment of enormous impact. I should see it again. I'm almost afraid to re-watch it, afraid it won't measure up to my memory. Al Pacino screaming, "ATTICA" to the crowds - and - the way Lumet filmed it, it looks like a documentary. It looks like it was really happening, in real-time - as though you turned on the television and saw this footage. Great film. Great acting.

I am going to busy seeing all the films this book mentions for a long long time!

More Reader Questions

These are from Ron:

1. If you won $1,000,000, what would be the first thing you would do with the money?

Give a chunk of it to each of my siblings, and to Cashel.

I'd also quit my job immediately and proceed to travel through Europe and Central Asia.

2. Who is your biggest hero (or heroine)?

Maybe John Adams.

The people on flight 93 also come to mind.

Anne Frank.

Sorry. Can't choose.

3. What is your biggest weakness?

Not believing in myself and my abilities. Self-doubt. Self-hatred. All of that is under the same umbrella.

Blogging From the Arabian Peninsula

I'm sure most of you have seen this, since I got it from Instapundit, but here is a new blog, written from inside Saudi Arabia. It's something else. Truly.

He is very courageous.

The tagline got to me: "A Saudi man's diary of life in the "Magic Kingdom", where the Religious Police ensure that everything remains as it was in the Middle Ages. In Memory of the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter."

Jesus God. I still can't get my brain around that one, and it happened 2 years ago. It's enraging.

He covers daily life, current events in Riyadh, ubiquitous cell phone use in Saudi Arabia, the hypocrisy of the Saudi clan-system... - At one point he exclaims, in regards to the corrupt religious police in Riyadh: "Holy warrior, Batman!"

And this blunt statement as well: "Any Saudi man who would rather be treated like a Saudi woman, is by definition nuts." Indeed.

Welcome to the blogroll, Alhamedi.

And speaking of courageous Saudis.

More Questions

1. If you could ask one question (and get an honest answer) of someone you knew personally but has passed over, a question you always wanted to ask but couldn't, what would it be?

How did Marilyn Monroe actually die? (I never claimed to be a particularly deep or thoughtful woman.)

2. Who is more admirable, Gary Cooper's character in "High Noon" or Clint Eastwood's character in "Unforgiven"?

I'm going with Gary Cooper. Speaking of which, I have got to see that movie again. It's been years. What a flick!!

3. When you write "Casablanca II," will Bogie and Ingrid end up together?
First of all, I think a Casablanca II would be an outrage. :) The unanswered questions of the first film should stay unanswered. But if I did write a Casablanca II, no - they would not end up together. Some love affairs are not meant to last - but are meant to remain powerful galvanizing memories. Things to push us forward, to remind us life is worth living. The memories sometimes are better than the realities. So no. It's over for them. Ka-put. Buh-bye.

More Questions

From Mercutio

1. Did Butch and Sundance make it out of that bolivian hut alive?

No way.

2. What's with the eternal line of cars on that one lane road in Field
of Dreams?

People throughout the land somehow, psychically, heard James Earl Jones' speech: "People will come, Ray. People will come." Somehow, they knew - that something extraordinary was happening. But they didn't know how they knew. It is "in the air". And suddenly they find themselves driving to Iowa. (All clues are in James Earl Jones' speech). And because of all those cars, the family will be able to pay their mortgage, and keep their farm, and Shoeless Joe will be redeemed. At least that's what I think the eternal line of cars means.

3. Just what did Bob Harris say to Charlette on that busy street in
Japan?

I love this question!! I don't know!

Here is what I think. I think he says something like this:

"No matter how lonely you get, or how sad, or how lost ... always know that there's someone out there ... who thinks you are one of the most fantastic women he has ever met. Never forget that."

Something talismanic, like that. For her to carry with her, as she moves forward. Something to help her keep her head held up high.

Or:

"In another time and place, Charlotte ... in another time and place..."

The second one has a kind of wistful subtext, assuring her that the connection between them was deep, meaningful, and on a soulmate kind of level.

What do you think he said?

Q/A time

Here are the collected questions. Some of them ... I swear to God, I don't even understand what is being asked. I think some of you just asked me questions for the sheer sadistic pleasure of hearing me say, "I have no idea what you are talking about."

From Emily:

1. If you could be a fly on a wall in any room in history, where would it be?

The first thing that comes to mind is the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I also wish, with all my heart, that I had seen the original Streetcar Named Desire, on Broadway, with Brando and Jessica Tandy. Actually, there are a million performances I wish I had seen. Laurette Taylor in Glass Menagerie, Eleanora Duse in anything ... I would have loved to be in the audience at the Old Globe Theatre, to see Shakespeare.

But first off - I would definitely say - at the signing of the Declaration.

2. If you could go back in time and assassinate one world leader, which one would it be?

Hitler

3. How would you do it?

Sneak up behind him while he is painting some lame-ass watercolor landscape, and shoot him in the back of the head.

From Mike K:

1) Do you believe in an ever-expanding universe, or one that alternately expands and contracts?

From my brief and baby-physics-level reading, I believe the universe is expanding and then contracting.

2) Can you get a good Italian beef sandwich somewhere near Times Square?

I'm sure you can but I don't eat Italian beef.

3) Should the Packers draft a QB or go with the best player available regardless of position?

I know nothing about football, but thanks for asking.

And Tommy sent me, perhaps, the strangest set of questions of the day:

1.) Does the Queen of England have the right to sleep with anybody she wants? Do you think that's good for the nation's morale?

Does the morale of England need lifting, is my question. I think the Queen of England can pretty much do anything she damn well pleases.

2.) The other day, I saw a guy in line at the bank cough. Some of the expellation landed on the back of the neck of the guy in front of him. The recipient turned angrily, looked at the cougher for a second, grabbed the cougher's baseball cap and used it to wipe the spittle off his neck. Don't you hate standing in line at the bank?

That is absolutely disgusting.

3.) Say somebody made it a law that on May 5, we all had to wear sombreros. Upon penalty of death. And somebody, a friend of a friend, somebody you know, but not closely, found themselves without a sombrero. You buy them a sombrero, but the next time you see them, they don't say thanks or anything. Do you bring it up? Or would you have them assassinated in the same style Emily would have you assassinate a world leader?

Are you saying this because of my sombrero chronicles?

I probably would say something like, "Hey, glad to see you're getting some use out of the sombrero" just to remind that person they owe me BIG. I would not shoot the person in the back of the head.

The following came from Rick:

1. Finish the following sentence:
If all Yankee fans are New Yorkers, and some New Yorkers are Red Sox fans, then all Red Sox fans are...
(This is an IQ question... be creative.)

I hate questions like this. They make me feel stupid. I'm sure it's totally obvious, but I can't see it.

2. Just what does Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" mean?

I have no idea.

3. Can a man really eat 50 eggs?

I imagine it is possible but the real question is: in one sitting? Or is it 50 eggs in his lifetime?

From Dave J:

1) Do fish REALLY sleep with their eyes open? (This is my obligatory response to whenever someone something to the effect of "ask me anything.)

I don't know. It sounds right. I don't even think they have eyelids. But that's a guess.

2) Is it possible to assassinate someone by using a sombrero, and if so, is time travel required and how does that work, exactly? (Fortunately, this is not a courtroom, so objections to compound questions will get you nowhere).

You could line the inside of the sombrero with some kind of acid that burns through someone's skin, causing some sort of death situation - or you could have some kind of time-controlled poison gas capsule in the strings that come down from the hat. When the person adjusts the neck-strings, poison gas is released. Buh-bye.

Oh, and time-travel is most definitely possible. Most definitely. Just snowboard your way down the slope of the space-time continuum. Very simple.

3) Have you read any more of the Silmarillion?

Dave - I finished it! I didn't make mention of it here? Yes, I finished the whole thing, and yes - once I succumbed to it, and figured out the style ... it all got much better. Or - I had a better time reading it. Can totally understand why Tolkien wanted to release it WITH the Trilogy.

Also - thanks for making me read it. I never would have without your persistence.

From Laura:

1) Which 5 books do you consider 'must reads'?

-- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
-- Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
-- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
-- The Dead, by James Joyce
-- Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

2) Who is your favorite Beatle?

I was always partial to George because of "while my guitar gently weeps" - one of my favorites.

3) What is the best song ever written?

Wow. Ever written?? Beethoven? Mozart?

I'll go with "In My Life", by the Beatles.

From MikeR:

1. With the astounding recent advances in teleportation , what's your opinion as to when the first human will say "Beam me up, Scotty" in earnest?

I know nothing about the recent advances in teleportation, and I do not want to do research to answer your question.

2. What's your assessment of the potential impact of legalizing the two-line pass in ice hockey? Would it significantly loosen the offense-dampening effect of the now dominant neutral zone trap?

I know nothing about ice hockey, except I have watched the HBO documentary about the Miracle on Ice about 45 times. But I'm in it purely for the emotion. Perhaps someone else who reads this blog is into hockey and will be able to help you out.

3. Why do fools fall in love?

Because fools are generally idiots, and only idiots would subject themselves willingly to such torture.

Oh, and also, cause the song says so.

Also, Shakespeare nailed it. Mortals are all fools, anyway.

Marathon Memories

Today was the Boston Marathon.

My grandparents lived in Wellesley (actually, my grandmother still lives there, in the same house) - which is just about the halfway mark in the Boston marathon.

When we were kids, every year we made a day of the marathon. Some of my "Boston marathon" memories go way back and become rather fuzzy and dream-like - so I must have been very small. These qualify as "first memories".

Later memories though: we would convene at my grandparents house. My cousins would also be there, because the Boston Marathon is a big deal. A big day for the city. And we LOVED that we got to see all the runners at the halfway point.

My cousins and I would mix Kool-aid in big pictchers, or we would get Gatorade, or we would mix sugar-free Crystal Light-y stuff, buy a couple packages of Dixie cups, and traipse down the hill to join the crowds lining the street. Everyone waiting for the first runners to appear.

Feeling suffused with seriousness and purpose, we would pour out Dixie cups of liquid, line them up behind us, and wait, peering up the street, tense, thrilled.

Then - one by one - they would come.

The first runners who pounded by never stopped for a drink. Of course not. They were about to finish a Marathon in less than 3 hours. These people are barely human. They do not need Gatorade. They are on another plane. They are definitely in the realm of the lonely long-distance runner.

We watched them pound by, in awe. It looked like they were on the first mile of the race, as opposed to the 13th.

Then - we could feel it. We just could feel the crowds approaching. The lesser runners, the ones who are way behind the leaders, the ones running in the pack. We knew that they would NEED us. We were trembling with responsibility. It was an AWESOME burden. (Remember, we were ... 9 years old. 10 years old.)

I still remember holding out these wee Dixie cups, with my wee 9 year old arm, and this thundering sweaty giant would swoop by, snatch it out of my hand, pour it over his head, without even stopping.

There was a skill to this. Definitely.

You had to keep a very gentle touch on your Dixie cup.

You had to be ready to let go.

Hold it very lightly with your fingertips. Keep your body out of the road, only let your little arm go into the road. They are looking for you. As they pound down the pavement, they are looking for you. They need you.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to make this exchange as easy as possible for the runner.

You must be invisible. You must merge with the Dixie cup. And then the second they grasp it, you must let go of it. That way, nothing will be spilled.

Oh, my cousins and I spent rapturous hours getting all of this down to a science. We loved this job. We loved being all important, like little Boston Marathon Red Cross nurses.

I remember the first time we were at the finish line. Which was a whole other story, and not at all fun. You see people weeping, you see people throwing up, you see people lying on the ground surrounded by doctors, staggering around looking like refugees - By that point, after 26 miles, people's personalities have broken down.

I read some marathon runner who said something like: "A marathon is actually 2 separate races. The first 24 miles, and then the last 2 miles."

Things happen to people during those last 2 miles. I saw it again when I watched my friend Liz cross the finish line of the New York marathon a couple years ago. I saw her at halfway mark, and then we went to Central Park to see her cross the finish line. The transformation of human beings, runners we had just seen an hour or so before, was startling. Unbelievable. I'm not just talking physically, although you can obviously see people struggling with pain. It's the other transformation - the psychological transformation. Liz was running, and openly weeping. I've never seen her cry like that.

It was kind of incredible.

However, when I was a little kid at the finish line, I thought all of that stuff was terrible. I felt so BAD for everyone.

I much preferred standing at the halfway mark with my cousins, watching the giants thundering down towards us, holding out their arms for our Dixie cups of Gatorade.

Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year

Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution - which also means it is the anniversary of "the midnight ride of Paul Revere". (Thanks Cold Fury.) Revere started on his ride on the 18th, and rode through until the 19th.

In honor of these extraordinary events, I give to you, Henry Longfellow's wonderful poem: Paul Revere's Ride.

Paul Revere's Ride

Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. He said to his friend, "If the British march By land or sea from the town to-night, Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-- One if by land, and two if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
>From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

My Roof

From my roof, I can see all the way from the George Washington Bridge down to Battery Park. It is a view to take your breath away. You step out onto the roof, and can feel the vistas billowing off to your left. It's amazing.

If you actually live on the island of Manhattan, the only way to get any perspective on it is to get up really high - skyscrapers, Empire State Building ... from there you can see the shape of the island, you can get an idea of where you are in space. (It's very hard in Manhattan to know where you are. I don't mean within the city. The city itself is very easy to navigate - if you know how to count, that is - but in terms of Manhattan fitting into the surrounding landscape ... I find it very difficult to picture. Even when I look at it on a map, it doesn't seem right.)

So to live in a spot where I can gain this island-length perspective ... I feel truly grateful.

When I was basically BEGGING the woman who lived there that I WAS THE ONE to take over the apartment - she took me up onto the roof, and that was that. I knew I had to live there.

I'll take some pictures so you all can see. I still never get over it. I never get accustomed to the view.

My street, on the cliffs in Jersey, is directly across from the Empire State Building. It looks so close you feel like you can touch it.

I haven't been able to go up there all this long and brutal winter. Too windy. Snow drifts, etc.

I'm excited to spend some of my early mornings up there. And sunsets as well.

In memory

... of all of those who lost their lives on that awful day in this country's history.

Here is the front page of the New York Times: April 19, 1995. Horrific. It still makes me angry when I think about it.

May everyone who lost family members find some peace. Shreds of peace, perhaps, but peace nonetheless.

Michele (who is blogging again, on her own damn terms, hoo-yah!) has some very moving links and images.

Hooray for me

I actually got some work done yesterday. After all of my procrastination activities. Once I actually get going, I know exactly what I am doing, where I am going, and how to work.

It's just the getting started ...

Oh, and for you other writers out there - I learned (for myself) one of Billy Wilder's 9 rules for writers.

Billy Wilder (and if you don't know who he is ... I just don't know what to say.) He wrote numerous screenplays, directed some of the most popular and successful films of the 20th century - Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment ... and on and on and on ...

He is such a good writer that he is studied.

He has these 9 rules for writing (focusing on screenwriting, of course, but it could be relevant for writers of other genres).

And one of them is this:

"If something's not right in the third act, then look for the problem in the first act."

I can't stress how important and how true this is. I mean, it SOUNDS true - but I figured it out for myself this weekend.

Young Adam II

I can't say what Young Adam was about. It has no meaning. It is rather aimless, but I think that that is the point. The main character is a drifter. A man with a fluid identity. He moves from here to there, things happen, things don't happen ... I am not even sure why it is called Young Adam, although it is possible that I am highly stupid.

All of the acting is, of course, fantastic.

Tilda Swinton, Ewan McGregor, Emily Mortimer ...

The story of a mysterious man (McGregor) working on a barge in Edinburgh, sharing the barge with an unhappy married couple and their small son.

The film unfolds slowly, everything in shades of blue, grey, or black, with nothing explanatory, almost no exposition. You have to figure it out as you go, nothing handed to you on a plate - and at the end of the movie I was still vaguely confused by one scene. I could not figure out the chronology at points. But I do believe that that was part of the point.

Ewan McGregor's character is a man who seems to live outside of time. He lies. Constantly. But not because of any malignant reason. But just because he can. It's maybe a kind of laziness. Or a self-protective thing. At the end of the movie, we still know very little about him.

3/4 of the way through the movie, it is revealed that the McGregor character was once working on a book. It was difficult to reconcile that image with the almost wordless nature of the character up until that point. He seemed like your basic Scottish working-class. Coal-blackened fingertips, ratty sweaters, working on the river, not saying much, playing darts, having some whiskey. So to find out he was a writer ...

Like: who the hell IS this guy?

He's a kind of benign sexual predator. Like Ted Bundy without the murders, if you can imagine it. There was something creepy about it. Women were prey. Easily conquered. They also didn't seem all that real to him. They were symbols, or just body parts - something. Hard to define. McGregor played this very subtly, but you could just see him zooming in on this woman, or that woman. You always saw his eyes moving around, when he was in a crowd, looking, looking, looking - for that new girl, the next conquest. There was no joy in it for him, though. It was like a shark hunting.

It was unexplained why he was that way. He was not a cruel man. There was a kindness in him, a humor. A gentlenss. Women obviously like that about the character, which explains why their panties would come off within 5 minutes of meeting him. But then, of course, they would fall in love with him, or have expectations of him, domestic expectations ... and it was funny: one of them said something like, "Well, when we get married..." and you could hear the ripples of laughter through the audience. Like: it was so completely obvious that this man could never get married. Ever.

But he was never clear about his intentions. Or even who he was.

You know nothing about him.

At one point, you see him throw his typewriter into the river. We don't know why. He tells one girl that he's moving to China. Of course, this is a lie. He meets up with one girl on the docks, a couple nights a week, and they have sex beneath one of the trucks, on the wet cobblestones. He doesn't say much to her. She talks too much.

The movie begins with him pulling a nearly naked dead girl out of the river, up onto the dock. He calls the police. He seems upset. He has been shoveling coal. His face is black, his hands are black.

An obsession grows, with the dead woman. He wonders if the newspaper will mention his name, as the man who pulled her out. He tries to put together what happened to her, in his mind. He imagines her standing on a bridge, taking off the items of her clothing, one by one, before jumping. It's almost like he is fantasizing about her suicide.

Meanwhile, he starts up a sex-thing with his friend's wife played by Tilda Swinton (the one who lives with him on this weird cramped barge.)

The sex is passionate. But not in a Hollywood way. (The film got an NC-17 rating, which is outrageous. It's just real sex, shown between real people. That's what's so shocking about it. It's REAL. That ratings system has got to go.) These are damaged mysterious people with a lot of pain. And imperfect bodies. She has a big white scar across her stomach. They are not lit in a soft-focused Hollywood way. They are on a scratchy bed, in a teeny room, on a floating barge, with barrels of fish around. They are not lit like movie stars. He is like a drowning man, when he makes love to her. You just don't see sex like that, in general, in Hollywood movies. There's one astonishing scene where she begins weeping. It's so real, so honest. He doesn't stop what he's doing - and eventually her weeping becomes sexual response. It's intense.

But he doesn't love her. Obviously.

He is nothing without conquering random women. They mean nothing to him.

This broody smoking coal-blackened man seems incapable of love. Except for maybe that typewriter on the bottom of the river.

And then there's the dead girl he pulled out of the river ... a relationship grows with her in his mind ...

The film actually, in its slow strange way, is a thriller.

Odd intense movie. A light-hearted comedy. Perfect for a relaxing Saturday evening.

Finally

Young Adam is opening. I have been waiting for this FREAKING movie for .... ever?

It feels like forever. Basically because I am 14 years old, mentally.

I'm going tonight. Love those gritty messed-up Scottish movies, where the art director doesn't let any color brighter than a soft grey-blue into the palate.

Yeah, baby. Bring it on.

Red Sox and then Young Adam. NICE.

It has been a lovely long day FILLED with busy procrastination. Emily - Evanescence was involved.

It's okay. Tomorrow's another day.

Red Sox

Life is sweet.

'Til tomorrow...

For those of you who read me regularly:

I got a letter from one of the triumvirate today. The one I dreamt about.

See? Didn't I tell you??

Mark Twain was right. (Thanks, Rick.)

Crowds

Here is the first little section of Elias Canetti's book Crowds and Power. It may not be everybody's taste - but within a paragraph or so, I felt this weird bottoming out inside of me, and I thought: "Okay. This is why people revere this book. This is why he won the Nobel Prize."

The first section is when he sets up his theme: the crowd. He starts with universals, generalities - and then, as the book goes on, gets more and more specific, giving examples from life. But here is how the book starts:

The Fear of Being Touched
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.

All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

The repugnance to being touched remains wiht us when we go out among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can. If we do not avoid it, it is because we feel attracted to someone; and then it is we who make the approach.

The promptness wiht which apology is offered for an unintentional contact, the tension with which it is awaited, our violent and sometimes even physical reaction when it is not forthcoming, the antipathy and hatred we feel for the offender [Ed: He is perfectly describing a rush-hour subway ride], even when we cannot be certain who it is - the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch - proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. Even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by a touch.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.

Last night

So last night was my sister's gig at a very cool mid-town club called Downtime.

She was awesome - she did a great job, sold a CD, and conquered her own nerves enough to play a great and relaxed show. I was proud of her! She even dealt with the hostility of a Yankee fan screaming at her from the back, as she introduced "161". She looked beautiful, she sounded great, and I was really proud of her.

The band that went up after Siobhan (and she was just up there solo, Siobhan and her guitar) had as much equipment as if they were going on tour for 5 months. They were three guys, and they had dollies, and cases, and trunks, etc. Siobhan, holding her guitar, came down the steps, and they hauled their 2346 tons of equipment up the 3 steps - and Rachel and I burst out laughing. I have to admit, it seemed a bit like Spinal Tap.

This 3-person band was so loud that I literally had to do caveman sign language to the bartender. "Here is what I want..."

"WHAT?"

Even screaming at the tops of lungs made no sound.

Here is how the chorus of one of their songs went: (Imagine loudness so loud that you feel like your body is going to shatter into 5 millioin pieces):

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

I mean, over and over and over with the "why"s.

Later, when we finally escaped, and moved, as a group to a quieter bar, we all started howling with laughter about it. About the "why's".

I was saying, "Why? You ask why? Just BECAUSE. Okay? Just BECAUSE."

There were 7 or 8 of us, hanging out at a bar around the corner, which was great fun. One of the girls, a friend of Siobhan's from college, was sipping her cocktail, and she was wearing these odd little black cotton gloves.

I didn't think anything about it, really - but then Siobhan said, "If you're wondering why she's wearing gloves like that - it's because she's a hand model."

This seemed unbelievably fascinating. I mean, I had HEARD about them, I had HEARD about these models who wear gloves 24/7, and who are highly prized - because beautiful slim fingers are very very rare. Hand models get work all the time, because there are so few of them.

But I had never met one.

She was this adorable young woman, with a ponytail, wearing plaid pants, big high-top sneakers, and black cotton gloves.

I said, wondering if this was inappropriate, "Could I see your hands?"

"Sure!" she said.

She drew off one glove, and displayed the most perfect most beautiful hand I have ever seen up close in my life. All of us, men and women, exclaimed, "Wowwww." (Which is kind of funny, when you think about it.)

We all recognized the difference between her hands and ours instantly. There is no comparing. Her fingers were slim, absolutely perfect, tapering - her skin was even - and smooth - her hand was perfectly white - They blew us away.

"How did you become a hand model?"

She's an actress, and she said that when she first came to New York, she met with a casting director, and she was sitting there, talking about herself, and her acting, using hand gestures, of course. The casting director interrupted her monologue and said, "Let me see your hands."

Within a week, she had her first modeling gig. And it hasn't stopped since then.

I just found the whole thing fascinating.

She said, "It's weird - but there is a weird skill to it. Like - I have to practice stuff like being able to move JUST my pinky finger a quarter of an inch up or down ... Like the photographers will ask you to do weird stuff like that. So I have to be able to isolate my fingers ..."

She treated the whole thing with humor and a kind of: Jesus, look at my good luck! Which was very cool. She didn't take it too seriously, although she took it seriously enough to wear special cotton gloves at all times (even when sleeping) - and she has refrigerator magnets as business cards, with a picture of one of her hands on it. She passed them out to us, and we all were just laughing at the whole thing.

After she left, we all sadly checked out our own hands, sitting in a circle, holding out our imperfect specimens for the group to see. We could never compete.

More on Saint-Exupery

An aritcle in the WSJ about Saint-Exupery's writing - which has kind of a hostile tone, in my estimation. Still - definitely worth a read. Definitely worth a read.

Granted, I am biased. Totally biased! Which is why the article may sound more hostile than it actually is. (I use the term "hostile" in a very mild way - I don't mean active violent hostility. Perhaps "gentle contempt" is a more appropriate term.)

To call Saint-Exupery's observations in Le Petit Prince "murky"! Murky? What the hell book were YOU reading, dude? Yeah, Le Petit Prince is one of the most successful and long-running best-sellers of all time because of its "murky observations".

Benjamin Ivry, the author, chooses the following Saint-Exupery sentence as an example of "murkiness": "Friendship is born from an identity of spiritual goals--from common navigation toward a star".

Uh ... sounds crystal-clear to me. Not only do I understand that with my head, but I understand it from my own experience of friendship. Hence: the universal appeal of the book. Ivry sounds hostile to the sentimentality and philosophy of Saint-Exuperty. And, as is probably obvious by now, I enjoy sentiment. I'm a little bit sentimental. (I'm a little bit rock 'n roll). At least, I enjoy sentiment if an author knows how to write it. And Saint-Exupery most certainly does.

One of Saint-Exupery's descendents has apparently just published a book entitled: "L'Inavouable: La France au Rwanda" - which is described as "a bold and courageous indictment of French foreign policy in Rwanda".

Having read Philip Gourevitch's absolutely phenomenal book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (and if you haven't read it - I literally cannot recommend it highly enough) - I agree that there is quite a lot to indict. And good for Patrick de Saint-Exupery for being brave enough to indict his country's policy.

But something about this article left a sour taste in my mouth.

It's the phenomenon (phenomena?) I see so often these days - but I don't know how to name it. Perhaps it can be encapsulated thus:

"Oh my goodness, I totally agree with everything you say - and therefore I LOVE you." (The person may be an absolute moron, but if you agree with his opinions, then he is your dearest brother.) Or, on the flip-side: "Hmm. I really don't agree with a couple of things that you say. Therefore I regard you with suspicion." (The person may be an absolute gem, a beautiful human being, but you happen to differ with them on important issues - therefore the person is written off.)

That's how the article in the WSJ read to me. Am I wrong? It's highly possible. I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet. It reads to me like this:

Oh, so we AGREE with Patrick Saint-Exupery - so he should be commended. We think Antoine is a bit "murky" and "swimmingly vague" - perhaps a bit too touchy-feely New Age ... and so we end the entire article with praise for Patrick, as opposed to praise for the gentleman who wrote a book that has (the article informs us) sold over a million copies every year, from the time it was published. NO books do that. Or only the big ol' famous books. The Road Less Traveled, for example. These books transcend genre, these books will never stop selling. The authors have tapped into something, something primal, something eternal.

It is interesting to contemplate, however, the source of Saint-Exupery's appeal. And again, I am totally biased, because I love his writing (and therefore I submit to the same mentality that Benjamin Ivry displays - except that I am on the opposite side.)

Is it the age-old fascination with flight? And some pilots, while perhaps brilliant technicians, cannot write well? So the pilots who are able to actually write about their experiences will, inevitably, find an audience?

Is it because he disappeared so mysteriously?

I guess for me it is the power of his writing, and also the whimsy of his writing. Basically, I just enjoy reading his prose (although, as I have said before - it's so much better in the French. French translated into English can read quite choppily.)

The study of crowds

I have already begun to read Elias Canetti's book Crowds and Power - it is dense, and rather slow-going, and yet - I can see why he is so influential, I can see why people who are interested in culture, civilization, war, humanity (Robert Kaplan cites Elias Canetti on almost every other page of Balkan Ghosts) - find him to be so useful.

This is a man who, like other great philosophers and scientists and thinkers, has raised himself above the horde. He has raised himself above enough to describe the way the horde behaves.

It's a book of philosophy, I would say.

The purpose of the book is to investigate the nature of crowds - how they form, how they behave, how they respond to panic, how they respond to a threat ...

I don't know much about Canetti's background. I know he was German, and I know he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. He was also a novelist, quite a successful novelist - but Crowds and Power is his main accomplishment.

I'll post some excerpts so you can see how he writes, what he is about. The book, obviously, has a lot to say about the times we are living in, with crowd mentalities cropping up like brush-fires across the planet. A couple of passages resonated with: "Wow. He is describing NOW".

He takes crowds of all kinds, and dissects how they behave. The crowds who gather in churches, how those crowds are different from the audience at a play, how the audience at a play differs from the audience at a cello concerto - and then he goes further, into a geo-political mode - describing revolutions, crowd mentalities ...

I cannot tell you how gripping this book already is. By the second paragraph I was hooked.

So again: I want to thank the reader who sent it to me. It is a wonderful gift.

Oh, by the way: do I have any readers who speak German? Or who can read German enough to translate it into English?

Diary Friday

I decided to plumb more of the depths of the autobiographical sketch I wrote when I was 14 years old.

Here goes. I describe the beginning of my friendship with Betsy, in 5th grade. We are complete goofballs, and it was like we were best friends from the first second we met.

SHEILA'S LIFE STORY

(written at age 14)

I don't know when it happened, but Betsy and I just hit it off. I think it was when we were in gym and Miss Rogers, our teacher, announced that Jan Grant was coming to teach us some games, and we both went into hysterics and we found out that we both knew her. Maybe that was it. Whatever. We were best friends.

She liked Bobby B. that year, and I loved Peter A, with a passion.

Every single day after school, she would come over my house, or, more often, I'd go over to hers. Her father is a minister, and they live on campus in an adorable cozy house beside the church. Her mother is great, and so is her dad.

Betsy has her own room with bunkbeds, and it's full of knick-knacks. We would spend HOURS in there, mostly tape recording ourselves. We listen to those tapes now and laugh until the tears stream down our cheeks and our stomachs ache. They are honestly the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life.

We would sing (very slowly because Betsy would be playing along with her autoharp [Ed: HAHA]). Or we would act out situations - like a reporter interviewing people going on a plane flying over the Bermuda Triangle.

Some of the replies: "Is this a plane?? I'm supposed to be on a bus." Or I would be a deaf person, making weird noises, trying to tell her that I was deaf, and she'd be going, "What? You want some gum?" Or she'd be an old deaf rock singer with her tamborine [Ed: HAHA], and she would be very very very slowly beating on it, and singing very very very slowly, as if she was on a record with the speed turned down. [Ed: Wow, now that's a time-traveler reference.] "Boooooogie-oooooooogie-oooooogie-ooogie..."

Recently, when I heard that tape, I don't think I have ever laughed harder in my life.

We would sneak out of her house and go to Kingston Hill and buy candy. I remember that one time Betsy had bought a Tangy Taffy and as we were running across the big highway [Ed: Again, with the "big highway" reference! It is literally a two-lane road], she dropped it. On the sidewalk across, we turned around and stared in horror at it lying there. So Betsy decided to run across and kick it across with her. When the coast was clear, she tore across and sort of brushed her foot against it. I was literally rolling around on the ground in hysterics at the sight. And she didn't get it across! All that work for nothing. Betsy was just about to dash out and get it when a car drove by right over it. We gaped at each other. Finally, Betsy scooped it up and ran back over to me.

As we were walking home, we opened up the Tangy Taffy and there was this chomp out of the corner. We laughed all the way home about the car taking a chomp out of our Tangy Taffy.

We spent hours at her house, listening to musicals and acting them out. Mostly "Oliver". We doted on "Oliver". We loved it madly. At home, I listened to it over and over and over. [Ed: My mother finally had to gently tell me, "Uh ... Sheila ... we're not going to be able to listen to Oliver anymore. Okay?"] I have a picture of both of us decked up in old long gowns, singing and acting out a number from Oklahoma.

We would spend our recesses sitting up on the jungle gym, singing songs from musicals. Maybe it sounds like we were showing off. I guess we were, but we were also just having fun.

Fifth grade was great only because of Betsy. I didn't love my teacher. But I made a friend that has lasted all the years.

I miss them all

Highly personal post. Consider yourself warned.

Because I am pretty much dense as fog when it comes to certain things - it has taken me a year or so to realize that three men I love (I always thought of them as a triumvirate) are really no longer in my life.

These were men who, although we were pretty much always separated from each other - by time zones, and other factors - always maintained some semblance of contact with me.

None of them know each other. They have nothing to do with each other. And yet - they go together in my mind. I didn't really date any of them, strangely enough - at least not in anything resembling a conventional way.

However, love affairs most certainly happened. Profound things most certainly happened. Deep connections were made. Stuff you can never erase, and stuff you can barely describe. (Or - let me be clear - stuff I can barely describe.)

One of them took the following photo of me:

I shared with him what remains, in my memory, one of the happiest and freest days of my entire life and I love that photo because it completely captures what that entire day was about. Photos so rarely do that. And I love it, too, because that was, in general, how I always looked at that guy. That was how I looked at him, that was how I felt about him. Pain-in-my-ass though he was.

Anyway, over the past couple of years - slowly but surely - my contact with these three men, men who I have always thought of as somewhat essential to me, has almost completely disappeared.

There are very good reasons for this, reasons which I will not go into.

I want to say, too, that I never had conventional communication with ANY of these men, either. What do I mean by that? I never called any of them on the phone to say, "Hey, how've you been?" None of them ever called me to chit-chat. Chit-chat would be impossible with any of them. I think I only had the phone number of one of them.

I was never used to hearing from them all the time, or getting calls from them, or exchanging emails - No. It was never like that. It was more like: my experience with each one of them came to an end, and that was that. No question of being in touch with them in a normal way. Maybe I knew something was just too powerful or something, that it could never morph into a normal post-relationship friendship. Must walk away completely. And that's fine. That's as it should be. I am friends with one of my ex-es in a "I send you Christmas cards" kind of way. I'm very glad of that - he's too great a guy to cut myself off from him completely - but I'm able to see him at parties, etc., and say, "Hey how are you? How's the wife? The kids? How you doin'???" I would never be able to be casual with any of the triumvirate.

None of them could be casual with me, either.

And so - when our time was up, our time was up.

But then - throughout the following years - I would randomly re-connect with one of them, or another one of them ... I would randomly receive a phone call, sometimes at 1 in the morning, and there one of them would be - laughing uproariously about something and launching right into a story he wanted to tell me, with no preamble, even though I hadn't spoken to him in 2 years.

Or, I would randomly open my mailbox, and there would be an envelope with familiar handwriting - and boom - I would be treated to a rambling monologue about his life, even though we hadn't been in regular communication for 5 years.

Weirder things happened, too. Stuff which might sound insane. But they happened so repeatedly that I can only say that it has become a pattern. The pattern is this: I would randomly dream about one of them, and the next day I would get a letter from that same guy. This has happened to me more times than I can count. It's become a bit like a game.

I so rarely dream of any of them, so now - when I do, it's like a game. "Okay. I give him 5 days to contact me." Usually contact arrives the next day. I'll open the mailbox, see the envelope, and burst out laughing. Here it is, I knew it would come!!

One day last year, all three of them called me on the same day. Two of them called me to say, "Hey, I'm in New York for the week, let's get together!"

There is nothing casual about any of this. I am obviously not casual about any of them. I also can honestly say that I am not in love with any of them either - and yet I have definitely come to rely on them, in some way. I don't NEED to hear from them - I do not bombard them with letters - I do not ache by the phone - No, it is all just the opposite. I move along, basically forgetting them completely, and then randomly - one of them will emerge from the deep - and I am reminded all over again of how lucky I am, and how blessed I am that - these guys are in my life.

One of them wrote me a letter once - a snail-mail letter (that's another thing - I communicated with these three guys in almost 19th century ways - in old-fashioned pen-to-paper epistolary ways ... we might as well have used smoke signals for how technologically backward it was - But I loved that, too. It seemed to fit) Anyway - One of them wrote me a letter, and said, after maintaining a completely goofball hilarious tone for the entire letter - "I'm really glad that you're out there. I like to know you exist. I even just like knowing that the IDEA of you exists."

I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.

I like to know they're out there. I like to know they exist. I even just like knowing that the IDEA of them exists.

My communication with these men from my past were filled with poignant and piercing moments such as that. It had a sweetness that hurt. It gave glimpses of a love that was never fulfilled, and so there were a lot of "what if's" - and actually, there are still are a lot of "what if's" that come up when I see the triumvirate and we reminisce about the past - and yet also - I was always extremely grateful that I knew these men.

Anyway.

Like I said, I would go on for months at a time never thinking about the triumvirate, or missing their presence.

I had a dream about one of them last night.

He had a handlebar mustache in the dream, and looked completely different.

I woke up, remembered the dream, and immediately thought, matter-of-factly, (welcome to my nutso world), "Oh, I'll probably hear from him tomorrow or the next day."

And then in the next moment, I became overwhelmed with what I can only call consciousness.

I moved from out of unconsciousness into consciousness with alarming velocity.

And it suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue:

It's over. I no longer feel that they are "out there". They've moved on. Whatever needs were fulfilled for each one of them by maintaining intermittent contact with me no longer exist. Or their needs are fulfilled elsewhere. Or maybe they are no longer comfortable looking at the "what if's" in their lives.

I have to admit I agree. I am sick of "what if's". "What if's" will eat you alive. They will break your back. They will break your back.

And yet I miss them. I do miss them all.

Unbelievable

Ann Louise Bardach interviews Oliver Stone in regards to his HBO documentary on Fidel Castro. Actually, it's more like interrogates. She basically skewers Stone on a spear.

A couple of incredibly stupid comments from Stone, who truly appears blinded by the "glamour" of Fidel Castro:

OS: I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.

ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?

OS: No, I didn't.

My favorite part of that is Oliver Stone's protest: "I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state."

Uh ... YEAH. EXACTLY.

And then this:

Castro has become a spiritual leader. He will always be a Mao to those people.

There's so much that is wrong with this. If you only talk to Castro, and if you only talk to Cubans WHILE CASTRO IS STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, then of course you are going to get a lot of bull shit answers. "Yes, we love him. We love him. He is our spiritual leader".

Is Oliver Stone aware that even Mao is no longer Mao to the people of China? Trips to Mao's birthplace used to be compulsory. Like pilgrimages to Mecca. Now it sits, gathering dust. Communism has basically been tossed out, in everything but name, and China now is consumed with performing economic miracles. Embracing capitalism wholeheartedly. Mr. "I wear a peasant suit every day of my life" Mao would have been horrified.

So Stone says, "He will always be a Mao to these people."

This is such a blatant misunderstanding, first of all of who Mao was, and also - of the nature of tyrants and societies in general.

There are too many quotes to even list about the temporary nature of all tyrants. Going back to Herodutus, and Shakespeare, and any writer who observes history and politics. The king always falls. Tyrants never die of old age asleep in their old beds. The Shah must go.

Mao's legacy of being a "spiritual leader" barely lasted one generation.

What the hell is Stone talking about?

He's in love with Communist leaders, that's apparent, and the long-debunked ideals of Communism - He remains completely blind to inconsistencies. He doesn't investigate things which do not agree with his world view. He also seems unaware that there are actually such things as "show-trials", and tyrants trotting out "happy peasants" just for show - to fool the useful idiots such as himself. These tactics have been used by despotic leaders for AGES. It seems beyond his comprehension to realize he has been duped. He has been fooled by the glamour of this leader.

Anyway. I've rambled enough - and Ann Louise Bardach does a much better job than I could of remaining logical, cool, and bombarding Oliver Stone with the uncomfortable realities of Cuba, as opposed to the Castro-loving propaganda he has swallowed, hook, line and sinker.

O'Malley announcement

To all New York City area people:

My sister Siobhan has a gig tomorrow night. Should be a lot of fun! Stop by if you feel like it! Here are the deets:

Where: The Downtime
251 W. 30th Street (between 7th and 8th avenues)

When: Thursday April 15th, 8 p.m.

Come out and celebrate the end of Tax Season.

Lyric sample for all my wacko Boston Red Sox readers:

Siobhan is probably the biggest and fiercest Red Sox fan I know. She wrote a rocking tune last year called "161", which she wrote after Opening Day, 2002:

161
Opening Day in baseball's done,
161 games left to go on.
And I wish the Red Sox had won,
but one game lost don't mean that we're done.
One game done and hope abounds
and i'm already hearing World Series sounds.
161 games to break some curse,
161 games to not think the worst.

Pop fly, so high
Keep going on and on
Pop fly, so high
Keep going on and on
161
161

Can't be cursed, can't be blessed,
Don't believe in hexes I guess.
Is that a ghost floating over Fenway Park?
A Babe Ruth in the Boston dark?
The myth that feeds fatalism
and gives a bad rap to optimism.
There are no ghosts if we don't make them,
There are no ghosts if we cannot shake them off.

Pop fly, so high
Keep going on and on
Pop fly, so high
Keep going on and on
161, 161

Don't call it a curse,
I said don't call it a curse.
The curse excuses losses away,
the curse relies on hyjinx and bologna.
We need a win, a path to agree on--
like the Citgo sign a beacon in orange neon.
Exorcise supposed ghosts.
161 games to just let them go.

Pop fly, so high
Keep going on and on
Pop fly, so high,
let it be a home run
161

Take away the power of the stars!
I'm gonna marry Nomar!
Nomar, Nomar
No more (curses), No more (curses)
161, 161

Book-shelf spying

The first thing I do when I go into someone else's house for the first time is peek at their book shelves. If they HAVE no book shelves or books, this is immediately obvious to me. It's on the same level of obvious-ness that, say, black-painted window panes or Christmas decorations in August would be.

But it is true that books can tell you more about a person than a rambling "this is my life-story" monologue from that very same person.

I went on 3 dates with a guy last summer who had only one book in his sprawling ridiculous bachelor pad: The Art of War. (He's the one I considered using for his air-conditioning during the heat wave.) There is nothing wrong with having The Art of War. I have read excerpts of it myself. It is fascinating. But it was the only book he had EVER OWNED. Call me a snob. I admit it freely.

To me, it SAID something about this person that that would be his only book, the only book he ever needed to own. He said he liked to use the precepts in business (again: there's nothing wrong with that - but titles like Catch 22 and Confederacy of Dunces floated through my head, helplessly. I didn't know how to talk to this person about one of my greatest passions - reading. He didn't get it.)

Obviously, I called the thing off with him for reasons other than The Art of War, but that was a definite contributing factor.

If you think I'm an elitist snob, I have nothing to say to defend myself, and I basically freely admit it.

I like people who read. There. I've said it.

All of this was brought on by this post - compiling reading lists, listing the last 20 books you have read.

It reminds me of John Cusack's monologue in High Fidelity about - the NON-trivial nature of knowing what someone likes, in terms of books and music.

Cusack says something like, "It is more important to know WHAT they like than what they ARE like."

I very much agree. How many friendships have begun because of a shared love of certain bands, or certain authors? I became friends with Meredith, one of my best high school buddies, because of a shared love of this kind of stuff: Star Wars, What's Up, Doc, Steve Martin, etc.

Erin lists the last 20 books she read in reverse chronological order. Much Dickens!

Here is my list of the last 20 books I have read (I think - this is off the top of my head):

-- Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington
-- H.W. Brands, Ben Franklin: The First American
-- Nancy Lemann, Malaise
-- Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life
-- Willard Sterne Randall, Alexander Hamilton: A Life
-- John and Abigail Adams, The Book of Abigail and John
-- Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths
-- CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
-- Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
-- Henrik Ibsen, Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People (I'll count those together.)
-- Stella Adler, Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov
-- JRR Tolkien, The Letters of JRR Tolkien
-- Humphrey Carpenter, JRR Tolkien: Biography
-- JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
-- JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
-- Stephen Lowenstein, My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film
-- Tennessee Williams, Collected Letters, Volume I
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (re-read)
-- Can't remember author - he writes for "The New Yorker", Dot Con - the story of the dotcom internet speculative bubble
-- Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture

Damn. I have certainly moved away from fiction. Gotta get that going again.

What are the latest books you all have read?

Against Interpretation

I am too young to remember living in a world where critics of art, literature, theatre, were giants of the form. I come from a post-post-post world. I can read their works in anthologies, etc., and am continuously breath-taken by how well they write, and how DIFFERENT they sound from critics today.

It is astonishing. It almost doesn't seem like the same genre.

Here is an extensive article on this very decline. The typeface is a bit too small for comfort, warning!

Susan Sontag wrote a formative book on the topic, called Against Interpretation, which was completely revolutionary at the time. She writes that the critic must describe the object of art (the play, the poem, whatever) - without interpreting it. A daunting task, indeed. We all interpret. We read stuff, we hear music - and we make up meanings for it all. Based on our own personal experiences and our own baggage. Moby Dick is not the same book to two different people.

The current trend of criticism (and who knows, maybe it's changing - I can't tell) - is that we, the public, need these hoards of interpreters. Art is WAY too loaded with meaning for us to understand without their translations. Hence, the almost unreadable prose of criticism these days, of "theory". With all its "isms" and long long long words - paleocriticalanthropologicalblahblah blah.

The interpreters have lost the meaning. Their language has tipped off the deep end. They now are imitating themselves. They are writing for one another, not for us.

Camille Paglia sees herself as an avenging angel in this regard. She hates "theory", she hates postmodernism, she hates isms in general. Her scholarship is a bit shaky and people rightly laugh at some of it. I read Sexual Personae, her runaway hit on the history of art. It's completely enjoyable in a kind of high-school-rebel "Hey, look at me knocking over all the traditions!" kind of way. She goes from the statues of Nefertiti to the poems of Emily Dickinson. It is an amazingly ambitious and arrogant book. I loved it. She draws connections between Roman friezes and Led Zeppelin. Which is ridiculous. She's a wacko! And yet - her knocking over of the chess pieces, while somewhat messy, was welcomed wholeheartedly by many.

A quote from the article:

For Paglia and critics like her, a poem or story (or piece of art or other artifact) is less object than touchstone in the vast cultural subconscious, and she takes advantage of this to push her readings beyond traditional limits of authorial intentionality or historical chronology. Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humour of a Camille Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance seems, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humour is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal. How sad, by comparison, is the critic who seems unaware of the inner workings of his own profession, who acts as if he is the only one who sees Waldo in the picture and can point him out to you.

It is that last attitude - the critic who thinks "he is the only one who sees Waldo" - is why criticism has lost its broad appeal. Who wants to be condescended to like that? I don't!

Any genre goes through phases, any genre worth its salt evolves and morphs over time. Like the novel-form, or poetry ... Criticism is the same. I get the sense that the tide has begun to turn, and I'm quite glad about that.

Trivia

What is the largest single religious building in the world?

The "To Don't" List

A couple of years ago, Liz (a friend of mine) and I, while out for drinks celebrating my birthday, started talking about "To Do Lists". Not "to do" like: "Pick up dry cleaning" or "Pay bills". More like: Things we felt we HAD to accomplish before we shuffled off this mortal coil. We got so into it, that we wrote them all down on a sheet of loose-leaf (which I still have, and which I am looking at right now.)

After this enlightening exercise, Liz mentioned that there were some things that she felt she never had to do. These were decidedly random, and also - things that a lot of people would LOVE to do. But Liz was saying No to these things. She never felt she had to go into outer space, she never felt that she had to go to a desert country in the Middle East, she also never felt that she had to waterski. She had made it this far in her life without waterskiing, or competing in an equestrian event, or ski diving ... and she could check those off her list.

So we came up with another idea: creating a "To Don't" List, comprised of things which we never felt like we HAD to do. There is sometimes anxiety surrounding "To Do" lists, an urgency, an anxiety ... Before I die I MUST see the Great Wall of China!! Etc. We felt that compiling lengthy lists of things we felt we NEVER HAD TO DO could be empowering. And it was. It was also hilarious.

Obviously, much controversy arose. I would mention something I felt like I never had to do, and Liz would freak out, saying, "Oh, but it's so FUN! You're missing out!!"

Too bad! I still don't EVER have to do it. There's a freedom in that. There's a freedom in saying 'NO' to something other people may find irresistible.

That is the whole point of the To Don't List. It is completely personal.

As a matter of fact, there were a couple of things on my "To Do" list which showed up on Liz's "To Don't" list. And vice versa.

This is the nature of humanity.

One woman's dream come true is another woman's utter shrieking nightmare.

I will list here, for you, the "To Don't lists" of both Liz and myself. Hopefully it will spark up some rather amusing conversation in the comments.

Are there things you feel you NEVER have to (or want to) do? Remember, most of these things are usually considered fun and amazing by other members of the population - It is just that you, of your own free will, have decided you don't ever have to experience such pleasures. You are fine without them.

(Oh, and by the way: Grammar nags? I know there is no such thing as "To Don't" and it's not correct, grammatically. It just is a catchy phrase and Liz and I enjoyed it.)

Liz's To-Don't List
Ski-jump
Waterski
Make an outfit from scratch
Places I never need to visit: Iran, Iraq
Compete in an equestrian event
Go into outer space
Ski dive
Be CEO of a company
Work on Wall Street
See a ghost
Do a Triathalon (Interestingly enough: Since compiling her To Don't List, Liz has now done the New York Marathon two years in a row - not a Triathalon though!)

My To Don't List
Teach myself complicated recipes
I don't need to go to Mexico
Waterskiing
I don't have to go to Disneyworld
Read the works of Agatha Christie (I KNOW, I KNOW - I KNOW she's great - but life is so short, and there's so much to read, and I am crossing her off my To Do list)
Sew an outfit or make a scrapbook or do anything craft-like
Go fishing
Become proficient in Power Point
Traipse through a wild jungle

Please comment. Add your own. I'm sure I'll think of more. It has the potential to be an endless list.

Expert Essay: The Martini, by Skillzy

Following please find the latest addition to my Expert Series (still waiting for that "How to throw a Pity Party" essay - I read an excerpt and laughed from start to finish). If you think you are an expert on anything - send me an essay!

The essay I just received is called "The Martini", written by Skillzy of hard times. I know how strongly people feel about martinis, how they like them, how they should be made ... Hopefully, this well-written essay will generate some discussion. I found it extremely enjoyable to read!

The Martini
by Skillzy

"When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have the second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me" - William Faulkner

The martini has long been recognized as the premier power cocktail, associated with big names and classy joints. Names like Hemingway, Sinatra, and Bond. James Bond. Nothing goes better with a white dinner jacket and bowtie than a "silver bullet". Unfortunately, in recent years, the rise of the "martini bar" has cheapened and desecrated the reputation of this beloved drink. It started out innocently enough, substituting vodka for the requisite gin. But that lapse in judgement opened the door to bizarre mutations using various liqeurs and a rainbow of colors, all attempting to pass themselves off as martinis. Serving raspberry-flavored vodka and amaretto in a martini glass does not make a martini. It's simply a waste of a clean martini glass.

Part of the beauty of the martini is its simplicity. But in the right hands, these few items can be transformed into a creation greater than the sum of its parts, the king of cocktails, the very essence of cool. You'll need the following:

GOOD gin (I prefer Bombay Sapphire)
Dry Vermouth (Martini & Rossi works fine)
CRUSHED ice, the finer the better
A cocktail shaker, preferably with a shot measure for a cap
Martini glasses (a MUST)
Olives for garnish

This is all you need. Optional items include curvy blonde, yacht, Walther PPK, and tuxedo. Despite the current trends in casual clothing, please dress appropriately when enjoying martinis.

Fill the martini glass with ice to chill it, and fill the shaker halfway with ice. Add 3 parts gin and one part vermouth to the shaker - I usually use the shaker cap for this. Place the cover on the shaker and shake gently 4 or 5 times, until frost begins to form on the outside. Take the glass, dump out the ice, and strain the martini into it, leaving the ice in the shaker. Add an olive or two and serve. Shards of ice should be evident in the drink. A key to a good martini, along with using top-shelf gin, is serving it as cold as possible.

About the only room for variation is in the ratio of gin to vermouth, ranging anywhere from 2:1 to just adding a splash of vermouth to the gin. I suggest that you experiment to find the ratio that's right for you. By the third one, it won't really matter anyway. If you really want to go wild, get some of those big olives stuffed with jalapenos or almonds to put in your drink.

Now for a few don'ts. Don't mix martinis in a big pitcher, despite what you've seen in the movies. They don't get cold enough, and the ice melts and waters things down. Martinis should be hand crafted in small batches, and consumed quickly. This is why Bond liked his shaken, and not stirred. And a martini should never be served on the rocks. If someone should ever try to serve you a martini in a rocks glass full of ice cubes, it is perfectly acceptable behavior to toss the drink in their face and proclaim them a "cretin". They're probably just trying to water down the taste of that rotgut gin that they bought in a plastic gallon jug at the Liquor Barn. Don't stand for it.

It is up to each and every one of us to help restore the dignity and reputation of the traditional martini. Never pass up an opportunity to set the unbelievers straight. I'll leave you now with some good advice from the immortal Steve Allen - "Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth."

Other Expert Essays:
A Dog Trick, by Noggie
How to Catch a Snake, by Daniel Medley
How to make Chili, by Dean Esmay
Horse racing, by Michael Thomas

Lent

This season has always been my favorite in the church calendar. The melancholy of Lent, the altar draped in purple, the solemn sense of waiting, the self-sacrifice and dietary restrictions ... all of it appealed to me as a child - Perhaps it was my developed sense of drama and aesthetics that responded so strongly to the theatre of the church (especially during Lent). That's what it seemed like to me, and that is, in essence, what it is. Not in the sense of being phony - but in the sense of it being a ritual, acted out in public, a community ritual - with props and costumes and music. A collective event, with elements you could count on every year. The colors, the stations of the cross, Good Friday and the silence of the church, the seriousness of it ... counting down ... to Easter ... when the priest gets rid of his purple robe, and dons a white one ... All of it spoke to me on such a deep level as a kid. I suppose it still does.

The solemnity of Lent is lifted in the joy of Easter. The hope, the wait over, the church no longer draped in purple, but now filled with brighter colors and with white - an abundance of white. Easter is impossible without Lent. You must go through the time of solemnity, suffering, self-sacrifice - in order to experience any rebirth. It makes a lot of sense.

Happy Easter.

I'm free

My taxes are done. I feel like weeping with relief.

The computer doesn't allow the apostraphe in my name, though, which pissed me off. Kept getting "error" messages. Er - my name has an apostraphe. Okay? It's a valid way to spell a name. There is no error.

But that's a quibbling point. I am so glad they are done.

Additionally: I finally watched House of Sand and Fog this morning and - found it to be one of the most devastating movies I have seen of late. I did not know the plot but I had seen the preview, and - quite frankly - it looked bad and melodramatic, Jennifer Connelly screaming from her car: "THIS IS A STOLEN HOUSE!" I thought: Jeez, why am I supposed to care about this woman's house? I was quite quite wrong. The film is wrenching. Events step forward with the inevitability of a great tragedy - and yet - when something absolutely dreadful finally occurs - I was left completely unprepared. Somehow, I had blocked out the possibility. (This is one of the things all great tragedies have in common, come to think of it. You hope against hope that things will work out, that the web will be untangled ... and yet, you as an audience member, are forced to watch the characters muddle about in the dark, making fateful mistakes, doing their BEST ... That's where the tragedy comes in. Because "there by the grace of God go I.")

I really can't think of a finer actor than Ben Kingsley. His work transcends language - I can't even talk about it.

A terrible story. Filled with hope, dreams, love ... every character three-dimensional, every character with a valid point to make. There is no right side, no wrong side ... both characters (Jennifer Connelly's and Ben Kingsley's) are coming from sincere heartfelt places - we can understand the motivatoins of both. We cannot choose.

Which is why it is so terrible. You just have to watch ... helpless.

Afterwards: I took a 3 mile walk in the sun. Emotionally wiped out. And then I did my taxes. And it's only 2 pm.

Tonight's movie? Year of Living Dangerously. A favorite of mine, although I haven't seen it in years.

Update: Strange: just looked up Roger Ebert's review of House of Sand and Fog, and the first sentence is:

It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides.

Exactly. Which is why it is so painful. You're kind of rooting for everybody. Nobody is a villain here.

Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, "House of Sand and Fog" sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. It is based on a novel by Andre Dubus II, and there must have been pressure to cheapen and simplify it into a formula of good and evil. But no. It stands with integrity and breaks our hearts.

Indeed.

More bad movie reviews

Last week was the fun of "Walking Tall".

This week is the fun of "The Whole Ten Yards". I have now seen the preview for this movie about 8 times - You can literally feel the badness wafting off of it like a scene. It exudes badness.

Leave it to Roger Ebert to sum it up:

The movie has the hollow, aimless aura of a beach resort in winter.

And here is this shocking indictment, where Ebert singles out one of the performances:

Lazlo Gogolak is played by Kevin Pollak (again) in one of the most singularly bad performances I have ever seen in a movie. It doesn't fail by omission, it fails by calling attention to its awfulness. His accent, his voice, his clothes, his clownish makeup, all conspire to create a character who brings the movie to a halt every time he appears on the screen. We stare in amazement, and I repeat: What did they think they were doing?

(I read that, and it kind of makes me want to see it.)

Diary Friday

So it's Good Friday. I found an Easter Sunday entry in my journal from sophomore year in high school, and while it is relatively embarrassing to me - I will post it here now.

April 1983

I went over to Mere's on Saturday to see her perm. That whole family is hysterical. They always welcome me. I went over and Jayne brought me in and the dogs went crazy. Mere was still up in her room, so Jayne took me up the backstairs because there were customers in the hall. Mr. W. is a photographer. The back stairs were pitch-black and creaky, and Jayne whispered, "Doesn't it feel like we're Nancy Drew right now?" It did!

At the top, I began to slink around the hall, pretending I had a gun. (Obviously, I feel very at home in their house.) I banged on Mere's door and yelled, "POLICE. OPEN UP." (not realizing that there were customers below us.) I went in and there stood Mere in the middle of her room in her nightgown and her hair!! I don't know what I envisioned when she first told me - but not what I saw. It looks EXCELLENT and very natural. I squealed and ran over to her and started rumpling up her curls - they looked bouncy and cute, and like her hair had been like that forever. For some reason, I had pictured a frizzy Afro or something, because she told me on the phone that it stuck out "2 miles" from her head. I think Mere exaggerated slightly, because it looked really good.

We went downstairs to show my mom who had come in to talk to Mrs. W. We then all sat around and talked about haircuts and college. [Ed: I love that.] Jayne got accepted at EVERY COLLEGE SHE APPLIED TO. [Sheila, please stop screaming.] Jayne at college!! GOD!

Later that day I watched "Butterflies are Free". Goldie Hawn is, I believe, my idol. I swear. She does everything and seems happy. Acts, sings, dances, is hilarious, has two children, knows Chevy Chase [Ed: To me, that was her greatest quality, apparently], and controls her own life. I would love to be able to do it all. I do want a family. I think I'd like to have a boy first. Then maybe another boy, and then a little girl for the boys to protect. [Ed: So much for all the hard work of the feminists in the generation before mine.] I also would like to have a gorgeous, smart, funny husband. (Not in that order, particularly. In terms of importance, "gorgeous" would come last.) I'll have some kind of career. I'll choose a career over having a husband, if I have to. That's for sure. Chauvinism is my #1 pet peeve. I despise it. Man, I'd show 'em what women can do! POW. [Ed: And yet you think your daughter needs older brothers to "protect" her....Hmmmm....]

It rained on Easter the next day. Bummer.

So we found our Easter baskets and eggs. I had decorated my purple egg with the words "Jimmy Dean". [Ed: HAHAHAHA] When we found them, we all sat around and looked through them, and ate some candy ... We were all being careful of what we said around Siobhan, cause she still believes in the Easter you-know-what. I guess the Easter Bunny had hid a present for the whole family and then couldn't remember where he put it. Mum said, "Well, the Easter Bunny can't remember where he hid it, but I'll ask him" and Brendan said, "See Siobhan, Mum is a friend of the Easter Bunny--" And then Jean went, "As a matter of fact---" and then stopped. I exploded into hysterics. Just the way she said it! Seated on the floor, surrounded by candy: "As a matter of fact---"

A policeman dropped by to ask us if we knew anything about kids with BB guns who had shot a window. Me and Mum were standing in the kitchen and Siobhan came in and informed us, "There's a police out there" and Mum looked at me, and I said, "I confess. Whatever it is, I confess."

Then we went to mass.

After mass, we drove up to Mummy Gina's. [Ed: My grandmother] On the way up I started a new story that I'm going to send into the "17" writing contest. At Mummy Gina's, Tom was there, and Terry and Diane with little Matthew who can walk now! [Ed: "Little Matthew" is now a 6 foot tall man. Scary.] What a doll! We stayed for about an hour and a half, watching MTV. [Ed: MTV was still this huge novelty then, obviously, and my family didn't get cable until ... oh .. last year? No, just kidding.]

Then we drove over to Mama's [Ed: My other grandmother] and the Sullivans were there. Lisa [Ed: my cousin] is a nut. The girl is positively insane. She is CRAZY. I can not even speak when I am with her because all I do is laugh.

After the Sully's left, Kathleen and I found this closetful of hysterical shoes and strutted around in them, laughing.

Then, Susan [Ed: These are all cousins] came home from work and she looked gorgeous. She was wearing this dress that looked like it came out of 17 magazine. [Ed: Praise indeed] It had all these stripes of kind of dull colors, and a slanted waist, and a full skirt. We had a great time.

Susan and I made sandwiches, and then sat around talking about General Hospital. We laughed UPROARIOUSLY about Dr. Dante, and we both adore Blackie Parrish.

The ride home was in the dark, but I held up the book I'm reading so I could see it in the headlights of the car behind us.

When we got home, it was 9:21, to be exact, and I TORE into the house to see "The Sting" - which had started at 9. We hadn't missed much. [Ed: I had seen the movie many many times, knew it by heart.] Paul hadn't even come on yet. [Ed: Ah yes, on a first name basis with Paul Newman] Paul -- AND Robert -- on the screen together -- honestly, it is just too much. Paul, in the movie, always wears overalls, and a sleeveless T, and a fedora, and OHHHH he just looks exquisite. Perfect.

I kind of want to be a con man, actually.

US States

Can you pass the third grade?

Remember - it is timed! I didn't realize it at first - and ran out of time. So no, I did not pass the third grade. I am ashamed.

The whole thing about hindsight

David Ellis at Wunderkinder has a great post up about the 9/11 hearings.

It's pretty common-sensical, but common sense is lacking these days. His words are a breath of fresh air.

A tangential story - let's call it an analogy, a parable, which I think is appropriate:

A great friend of mine from college was dating a certain woman, 10 or so years ago. They dated for a couple of years. It was a bit tortured, to say the least. He's an actor, a bohemian - she was obsessed with money, material possessions, and getting married. [Er, honey? If those are your obsessions - then go hang out in a bar on Wall Street - don't date an actor] She wanted him to change. However - they dated for a couple of years. (Strange coda: He finally "caved" - and proposed to her on the top of the Empire State Building - and my GOD - she turned him down. This woman was a bitch, I'm sorry.)

Anyway. I didn't like how she treated him. She wanted to tame him, domesticate him, change him.

The two of them went on a trip to the Catskills. They rented a car and drove out of the city. They stopped at an inn and had what my friend described as a really romantic and wonderful dinner. He said he felt great, really close to her, etc.

But then came out to the car, only to find that he had left the headlights on by accident, and now the car's battery was dead.

Annoying? ABSOLUTELY.
Inconvenient? YOU BETCHA.

My friend's girlfriend, though, could not get past it. It ruined the rest of their weekend - even after the car was fixed, and they were in their B&B, or whatever. She KEPT bringing it up.

She actually said to him, 2 days later: "So ... what can we do ... next time ... so that this doesn't happen again?"

She tried to make his forgetting to turn the headlights off into some big meaningful thing about his personality.

As though she had never made a mistake, never forgot where she put her keys, never goofed up -

"So ... next time we travel ... should we write out a list ... beforehand ... so that you don't forget to turn the headlights off?"

I'm not kidding.

When I heard this story, I couldn't contain myself: Break UP with this bitch!

He eventually did.

The POINT of this tangent is that of COURSE - if he could have known the future moments of inconvenience - calling Triple A in the middle of the Catskills, the romantic mood ruined, etc - of COURSE if he could have seen into the damn future he would have turned the damn headlights off. Of COURSE he would have. But ... what is the point of going over it all, again and again and again? How could he know the future? When he got out of the car with her to go into dinner, he was happy, laughing, unaware that he had forgotten to turn off the headlights ...

How could you go back in time and try to right that mistake? Whisper in his ear? "Listen, bub, turn off the damn lights - that bitch of a girlfriend of yours is going to ruin the weekend about it..."

One last comment: I do believe that whatever errors in our security system have to be handled, located, addressed, etc. But this is ridiculous. The hearings make it sound like everybody was on HIGH ALERT during the Clinton administration, and then when Bush came into office, we all kicked off our shoes and relaxed. This is just plain not the truth. NEITHER administration was all: Let's tackle terrorism!!

I don't feel like writing about this anymore. It's too annoying. Just had to say that one brief thing.

St.-Exupery's Plane Discovered

Wow.

Antoine St.-Exupery's plane disappeared on July 31, 1944 - and nobody knew what had happened - until now. He vanished off the face of the earth, leaving not a trace of himself behind. (They still don't know why, exactly, his plane went down - but at the time, it was as though the author of Le Petit Prince had flown off through our outer atmosphere, and into the galaxy - not too difficult to imagine, considering the interests of the author. The melancholy and yearning of the author - encapsulated in his little book Le Petit Prince.)

The strange thing for me (and for others) about his disappearance was its correspondence to what happened to The Little Prince in the book.

The Prince appears, randomly, from outer space, from his teeny little planet which he shares with one rose. He appears in the middle of the Sahara Desert and befriends a pilot, sitting beside his plane in the desert. And then - after a relationship develops, the Prince disappeared again - after being bitten by a serpent. Obviously allegorical. But heart-wrenching and simply told. It is not idealogical, or brow-beatingly obvious. It's a fairy tale.

The last line of the book - (I first read it in the original French in high school, and am so grateful that I did - it's meant to be read in French):

"Ne me laissez pas tellement triste: écrivez-moi vite qu'il est revenu... "

"If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

Send me word that he has come back.

St.-Exupery's missing plane has been found, missing for all of these years.

Master Class with "Liza with a Z"

During my second year in grad school, it was announced to us by the head of our voice department, with great aplomb and pomposity, that we would be having a "master class with Liza Minelli". The department-head was her personal voice coach, and basically had an "in" with Liza.

I just want to get one thing straight before I launch into my tale of woe and cruelty (because I am probably going to say some cruel things about Liza):

In her day, in her prime, Liza Minelli was a genius. If you don't believe me, then watch Cabaret again. If you don't believe me, watch New York, New York. Also, the woman won (help me out here, Mitchell) - a Tony, a Grammy, an Emmy, and an Oscar. Maybe even multiple awards in these categories. I'm not sure - let's just say she's been medalled, left and right. You don't win awards in all of these different fields if you are a total JOKE. But along with her obvious gift, came a host of evils. Narcissism, alcoholism, self-destructive tendencies - all of which have basically resulted in Liza losing her voice. She can't sing anymore.

I know it's very easy to make fun of her now - she is kind of ridiculous now - yes. And her pop album (Liza with a Z) was ALWAYS mockery-worthy. If you ever need a good laugh, and if you get off on someone else doing something really reaaaaallly embarrasing, I highly suggest you find it, and listen to it with a raucous group of friends. My friend Mitchell and I used to BLAST it, during college, listening, singing along, and making fun of it riotously, all at the same time. What I am trying to say is is that it's not like she's on the level of, say, Siegfried and Roy, or something. The woman truly had a gift. If you don't agree, that's fine, but I don't really feel like debating it, because it's completely subjective - what I am saying is is that you can't argue with her accomplishments, and that she once had great acclaim.

Mitchell said about her once, "She commits - and FULLY - to the craziest things onstage. Like - someone with a normal ego would say - 'Uh. No. I'm not going to do that.' But Liza DOES."

Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she flopped. That's what happens when you take risks.

HOWEVER. My encounter with her, on the day of the Master Class, is worthy of a Tennessee Williams one-act.

How far the great have to fall.

It was only funny AFTERWARDS. While it was happening, I was a writhing mess of embarrassment and agony. My friend Jen, who was also in the Master Class, actually started to weep at one point. It was a truly traumatic experience. Which is hysterical. In retrospect.

So. Big fanfare. "Liza's coming! Liza's coming! Liza's coming!"

Normally, we had class in little classroom with a piano, but for Liza, we moved into Tishman, at the New School - a huge echoey auditorium, with a grand piano. A bit more welcoming and appropriate for LIZA. A couple of students were chosen to be guinea pigs. Ahem. A couple of students were going to sing, and Liza was going to work with them on their songs.

The class gathered in Tishman. There was a bit of ghoulish curiosity in all of us. To see Liza, in the flesh. What would she be like? What did the next hour hold for us?

I sat with one of my best friends in school, Wade, a crazy cynical Texan. Wade is one of the greatest and funniest men I have ever known. Sitting next to him was a mistake because there were a couple of times when I almost started guffawing like a lunatic during the Master Class, because of some caustic thing Wade whispered to me. Or, he didn't even need to whisper to me. He and I would just glance at each other, and I would be DONE.

Class was supposed to begin at 4 pm, so we all gathered in the auditorium at five of 4.

4 p.m. came and went. There were no "authority figures" around. None of our teachers had showed up. There was no Liza. It was just us. We were waiting.

Waiting for Liza.

Finally, at about 4:25 - (and yes, we did wait that long. All of our anticipation and ghoulish curiosity completely disappeared in the wait. It was like we were in grade school, and the teacher stepped out for a minute. Complete mayhem ensued. We leapt up onto the cavernous stage and did imitations of our teachers, we did imitations of each other, we did hostile imitations of the dean of the school, we shouted, we hooted, we hollered, we were completely out of control - and we were all ADULTS.) Anyway -

4:25 arrives, and all discipline has disappeared, and this is when Liza and the head of the voice department decided to show up.

The door at the back of the aisle opened suddenly. A couple of my classmates were engaged in some hostile improvisational skit up on the stage, involving imitations of a couple of our teachers - and so we were so busted. We bustled back into our seats, staring up the aisle in ghoulish curiosity at Liza. Our teacher for the day.

Liza was surrounded by the entire voice department. All 4 teachers were huddled around her.

She needed the support of 4 people to walk down the looooong aisle to the stage.

At times, she seemed about ready to collapse into a quivery mess, her knees kept buckling under her, and she would wildly stagger about, her legs going this-a-way, that-a-way ... and our whole voice department would stagger about after her, waiting to catch her if she fell.

Our mood of slap-happy ghoulishness disappeared at the sight of Liza. Who was obviously a wreck.

We sat quietly. Staring back at her, as she staggeringly approached us.

Now, for her outfit:

She was wearing a big triangular-shaped BRIGHT RED woolen coat - literally, it came out from her neck into a triangle, and it stopped just above her knees. Then, coming out from beneath the triangle, were two absolute stick-figure legs, encased in black spandex. Stick legs emerging from the massive red triangle.

Later, when I was describing the debacle to Mitchell, I said, choosing my words carefully, "In her outfit, Liza looked like ... she looked like ... I guess she looked like a bloated tick."

We expected Liza Minelli to come teach our Master Class, and instead we were faced with a bloated tick.

Years later, I had completely blocked out the whole Master Class, because it was way too disturbing. Yet for Mitchell (who wasn't even there) it remained a vivid memory. He said to me once, "Oh, member when Liza Minelli showed up and she was a bloated tick..."

I BURST out laughing and said, "Bloated tick??? That is so HOSTILE! And hilarious!!"

There was a pause, and then Mitchell said flatly, "Sheila, I'm quoting you."

Liza's hair was short (of course) - and she had a terrible case of bed head. Her hair was all squashed off to one side, and then the back was COMPLETELY flat. As though someone had held a plate onto the back of her head.

And the woman could not walk.

Unfortunately, none of you are with me in person right now - because I do a hell of an imitation of Liza Minelli's stagger-walk down the aisle.

Imagine this: you set your right foot out to take a step, but instead of putting it down directly in front of you, you scoop it waaaaaaaay out to the side, and - without putting your foot down, you then scoop it waaaaaay back in, across your other leg - and then you finally put your foot down on the ground. A wild perverse dance-step. If you try to walk like that, you will lose your balance. You will look very wobbly.

And when I saw her bedhead, coupled with the fact that she was half an hour late, coupled with the crazy woman walk comin' at me, I realized that she probably had slept the entire day away, and the entire voice department, alarmed, had raced to her apartment, woken her up out of her drugged-out sleep, slapped some clothes on her which happened to make her look like a bloated tick, didn't even run a comb through her hair, carried her into a cab, took her downtown, and then presented her to us, like: TA-DA, as though everything was normal.

It was SICK. It would be like taking a tour of some famine-struck country, and you're in a limo, and your tour guide keeps babbling about how happy the people are, and how great everything is, and yet - out the window you see stark misery.

Like: this woman needs to be in a HOSPITAL. Not teaching a Master Class!

The head of our voice department had a placid (and panicked) beam of pride on his face, as he held onto the staggering bloated tick.

He announced, "Class! I give to you: Miss ... Liza Minelli!"

Her eyelids were drooping down over her eyeballs compulsively, and her knees kept bobbling, and she swooped her head around to the class, smiling at us in a profoundly intimate and intensely disturbing way.

She had no idea where she was.

Just the FACT that I was sitting next to Wade meant that I was in trouble. In terms of laughing inappropriately.

Liza was helped into a seat in the front row. She said nothing to us. I don't think she COULD speak at that point. She was obviously on some kind of drugs. From my vantage point, now that I was sitting behind her, all I could see was the flat-back of her bed-head, and the red triangle of her coat ballooning out into the seats next to her.

She did not lead the Master Class. The head of our voice department said, "Matt ... let's start with you."

I cannot begin to describe to you the vibe in that auditorium. Nobody could even BREATHE. Liza was this bobble-headed bloated tick in the front row. It was so disturbing.

Matt goes up onto the stage, Les D. (our accompanist) took his place at the grand. Matt, politely addressing Liza (who could not have cared less), said, "I'll be singing blah blah blah today."

Then he sang.

When he finished, silence descended on all of us, as we waited for Liza to take over. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. Wade reached out and gripped my hand. I couldn't look at him. Someone needed to take the reins, and quickly ... I looked at Liza, in the front row, and - during Matt's song - her head had literally fallen back onto the back of her chair - nose up to the air - and she was FAST asleep. Her mouth was open, people. She was conked out, the entire time of Matt's song. And not just dozing in boredom, trying to hide it. This woman was openly FAST ASLEEP.

At this point, I started to get angry.

Not at Liza. But at the powers-that-be. They should have just canceled the damn class. This was ridiculous. This was so embarrassing. I thought I would die of embarrassment.

Matt, standing up onstage, glanced down at Liza. He obviously saw that she had just entered a deep REM cycle, so he just stood there like an orphan ... wondering what he should do, wondering who would save him ... should he bark out: "Hey! SLEEPY! You with me??" He just stood up there, arms hanging awkwardly, with this odd look of polite embarrassment on his face.

I was gripping Wade's hand. "This is awful," I whispered.

Wade was starting to get hysterical. I could feel it.

Department-head nudged Liza awake.

I am not exaggerating when I say she snorted as she woke up.

She had missed the entire song.

In this completely dazed drugged-out voice (and yet so completely recognizable as Liza's), she said up to him, "I'm sorry, darling. Darling, I'm so sorry. Could you run that by me one more time?"

It was at this point that Wade silently and unobtrusively got up and left the auditorium. He couldn't take it anymore.

So Matt politely ran through his song one more time.

During the song, the entire class nervously kept our eyes on the black head in the front row. Nobody paid attention to Matt. I saw Liza fall in and out of sleep about 10 times. It was like that guy on the bus you sometimes see, head flopping to one side, jerking himself awake, head flopping off to one side again, then jerking himself awake - over and over and over and over again. Sometimes she jerked herself awake with more violence than other times, jumping up in her chair, other times was more subtle. But this woman was obviously slipping into a perpetual coma all through Matt's song.

Matt knew it, too, as he sang. He said to me later, "I kept thinking - I don't know what to do. Should I stop? Should I just stop the whole class?"

Matt finished "running it by Liza one more time", and then waited. We all waited.

Liza then decided to teach. Which was even more awful than the narcolepsy. She stood up, and promptly fell right back down. 3 voice teachers leapt out of their chairs immediately to help her up. Liza decided she wanted to be up on the stage with Matt. So that she could teach.

I was terrified. I thought I was going to witness something awful. Like - the disintegration of a human being's personality. I thought she might start to ... tell us stories of her life, or start to try to sing for us, or suddenly start to weep like a gibbering chimpanzee ... It felt like anything could happen.

Frighteningly, she refused help in getting up the stairs.

It took her 10 minutes to climb the 6 stairs up to the stage. At every moment, she looked like she would collapse. Her teeny black-spandex stick legs were bucking about wildly, emerging from under the enormous red triangle.

Then there she was up onstage, untethered, no stair railing, nothing. Just Liza and Matt.

Matt was staring at her with a look of barely concealed terror.

(Later, as you can imagine, the entire class laughed about our Master Class with such abandon that the humor STILL has not died - and when we run into each other, we still reference it.)

Matt was alone. With the swaying bloated tick coming at him, saying absolutely incomprehensible things in a slurred incomprehensible voice.

It went like this:

"Well, darling, I think you're just wonderful...I really do, darling ... wonderful ... just wonderful, darling ... who ever taught you how to be so wonderful, darling? ... I think you need to flow with it more ... you know, darling? ... and what I like to do is to put my hand on the piano and just feel the flow, darling, feel the flow ... come over here with me .. come to the piano, darling ..."

Matt obeyed. I mean, what are you gonna do when Liza tells you to "come to the piano, darling"...

"Let's feel the music together now, darling..."

Les, our hilarious cynical pianist who always looked annoyed about life in general, began to play some random song, with this look of wounded pissed-off dignity on his face. I loved Les.

Matt was trapped, with his hand beneath Liza's. Matt was trying to feel the music, in front of the whole class, with Liza 10 inches away from his face, her eyes rolling back in her head.

"I'd like to hear you do it again, darling ..." (or, with all the slurring, it sounded like this:
"mmmmIdliket'hearyoudoooitagainnn,darlingallrightdarlingallright
....")

Then, of course, it took her 10 minutes to stagger her way off the stage before Matt could try it again. And, of course, with such unclear suggestions, he sang the song pretty much the same way as before. And Liza sat in the front row again, dozing off, jerking herself awake, dozing off, jerking herself awake, dozing off...

At one point, Jen, my dear friend and roommate, sitting a couple rows ahead of me, turned around to look at me, and she had tears running down her face.

It truly was abominable. It was shatteringly embarrassing to be in her presence. Which is why Wade left the room. I longed to be with him. I longed to be anywhere but there.

We went through the ENTIRE charade with 2 more students. Nobody intervened. We had to go on with the pretense that we were having a normal Master Class. I wanted to stand up and scream: "This is RIDICULOUS AND A WASTE OF TIME."

Our routine:
-- Student goes up onstage.
-- Sings. Liza sleeps through the whole thing.
-- Liza is then nudged awake. Murmurs in a slurred voice, "Could you run that by me one more time, darling?"
-- Song sang a second time. Liza sleeps through the whole thing, and is nudged awake periodically by head of voice department.
-- Then comes a litany of incomprehensible comments.

"darlingyou'resowonderful...truly.... yoursingingiswonderful..."

At one point, she mentioned "mama" - and I do admit I felt a shiver of a thrill. "Mama used to say..."

The last student goes up onstage, now KNOWING what is in store, now DREADING the ordeal before him, cursing the day of his birth, wishing he had never been born, knowing he has to deal with a staggering drugged-out bedheaded Liza as his teacher, and somehow be polite and get through it without falling apart. Same routine.

3rd student sings as Liza takes a nice long SNORING nap.

The whole thing was tragic. And PAINFUL to witness.

I felt completely abused afterwards. Like: I had been subjecting to something I did not want to see. I felt trapped. I felt PISSED.

The class FINALLY ended and I got the hell out of there, and met up with Wade, where we promptly began to find the humor in it, and we ended up laughing so hard that we could no longer speak, and our stomachs hurt the next day. We stood in a subway station, and I did an imitation of her terrifying stagger across the stage at Matt, and I thought Wade was going to jump in front of a train he was laughing so hysterically.

The next week, Liza left a message for our class:

"I am so sorry I let you all down. I had just had back surgery and was out of it from the pain killers. Please let me make it up to you, darlings. I would like to do another class with you all next week."

The 2nd Master Session with Liza was set up for the following week, but I cut class and went out carousing with Wade instead.

I will be haunted by the image of the bloated tick for the rest of my days. I love hyperbole.

Expert Essay: A Dog Trick, by Noggie

Here is another Expert Essay in my series, sent in by a long-time reader of this blog: Noggie. (Her other essays can be read here.) She has sent me an essay about teaching your dog a certain trick, in order to show people that you have " the world's smartest dog."

A Dog Trick
by Noggie

Here is a dog trick. It has no real purpose except that it is easy for your dog to learn and it is fun to do. It is some added variety to your interaction with the dog. Of course, it will be proof positive to the kids in the neighborhood that you have the world's smartest dog.

The trick is to teach your dog to go between your legs with each step you take. You will need to have small pieces of dog treats in each hand. Tiny pieces of wiener are ideal for this - and this is easier to teach when your dog is a bit hungry. When you and your dog have learned this trick, it will be like a small choreographed dance. You will notice, from the last sentence, that you have to learn this trick too - because you are part of this routine.

To start teaching this trick, have the dog on your left side, at or about heel position. Now have some treats in your right and left hand; and take a big step forward with your right foot. With this large gap between your right leg and your left leg, drop your hand behind your right knee, show the treat to the dog and say "through!". As soon as the dog starts to move and follow your right hand, praise. Lead the dog to the front of your right knee and allow it to have the treat.

As the treat goes in the dog's mouth, take a large step with your left leg. Drop your left hand behind your left knee and lead the dog through your legs. Lead the dog to the front of your left knee and allow it to have the treat. As soon as the dog is moving in the correct direction, following the hand with the treat, verbally praise. Sound excited. Tell the dog how well it is doing.

As soon as the dog has reached the front of your left knee, give a treat; take a step with your right foot; say "through", drop your right hand behind your right knee and lead the dog through your legs. At the beginning, you are treating every time the dog goes through your legs. You can do this for the whole first day. The second day, you can start with a treat for every pass through your legs. Then give the treat for every two passes through your legs - then every pass - then every two passes. Vary it so the dog hurries and make the dog work for the treats. Soon the dog will know what you want with the word "through" - and remember to praise. Tell the dog it is right. Tell the dog how smart it is. And have fun with this.

And you're right - this is difficult to do with a big dog like a great dane.

Other Expert essays:
Dean Esmay: How to make Chili
Michael Thomas: Horse racing

My Humiliation at the hands of The Rock

A couple years ago, The Rock hosted Saturday Night Live. If I recall correctly, AC/DC was the musical guest.

I know a couple of the people in the cast of SNL in a rather peripheral way from Chicago. We all share very good friends, from the old days of improv comedy. I used to watch Tina Fey (now the head writer, and the fabulous chick who does the Weekend Update) perform improv, years ago, in a teeny raucous club in Wrigleyville, with all of my friends.

Mitchell (a dear friend of mine) is very close to one of the cast members - and she got us tickets to the show.

Mitchell and I did not sit in the regular audience. We were in the plush VIP room at the back of the theatre. This room has a glass window, tons of TV screens, and a table of drinks for all. It's like being in the important-people boxes in baseball stadiums. So Mitchell and I were crammed in back there, having some cocktails, hanging out with the other VIPs, having a great time.

The show was fun - and The Rock was actually quite good. Willing to laugh at himself, poke fun at his image, all that.

Afterwards, we met up with our friend in the cavernous backstage hallway, and she took us down the street to the cast party.

The SNL cast party is a rotating affair, held in a different venue every week. Fans somehow get wind of where the party will be, and line the block, waiting for the cast to arrive. It's invitation-only, obviously. I got my first kind of red-carpet experience, as Mitchell and I walked with our friend, through the throngs, as she signed autographs, people yelled out to her, and frantically scanned OUR faces to see if we were important.

As you can imagine, it was a riot. We had a blast.

There was a huge dinner served. I can't help it, but I have to name-drop. It's not my fault. It's just that they all were there.

I talked with Molly Shannon for a bit. I LOVED her. She was very sweet, very neurotic, concerned that I was having a good time and felt welcome, and we also had a couple of friends in common.

Colin Quinn's manners were repulsive. Can't stand that guy.

I fell so in love with Will Ferrell that even though we also have friends in common I couldn't say one word to him. I feared I would blurt out, "I LOVE YOU!" and make some huge embarrassing scene at the Saturday Night Live cast party.

Lorne Michaels and all the big-wigs sat over at the important table, wining and dining their guest of the evening The Rock.

I could have cared LESS about The Rock.

I was too busy quivering in my stilettos about Will Ferrell. And taking Colin Quinn's sleazy arm off my shoulders.

Mitchell and I were two peas in a pod. We star-watched, but we also just had a blast with each other. It was great.

Finally - Mitchell told me that he works with two 17-year-old kids, both of whom LOOOOOOOOOVE The Rock, and he had promised them that he would try to get The Rock's autograph. However - in the scenario in which we now found ourselves - it was quite a daunting proposal. The Rock was sitting next to Lorne Freakin' Michaels, eating shrimp, sipping a glass of wine ... and it was clearly a crowd where everybody there (except for Mitchell and I) were famous. Asking for autographs was kind of not cool.

So Mitchell somehow roped me into going over to the VIP table and asking for The Rock's autograph.

It took 20 minutes of convincing for me to agree to do this.

Mitchell said, "It won't work if I do it! It'll be weird - cause I'm a guy - and he'll feel weird about it ... Just go over there and be all girlie, and flirty and he'll LOVE it - he won't mind giving you an autograph at all!"

My natural temperament is the opposite of girlie and flirty. I am also (all evidence to the contrary) very shy. I resisted this with all my might.

"No! I don't want to! I'm too embarrassed!"

(If it had been Ewan McGregor, I would have had no problem. But - to debase myself for The Rock???)

Finally.... what the hell ... Mitchell's pleading got through. How could I disappoint those two 17 year old kids? How excited would they be??

So. I basically decided to just not act like myself at ALL, in order to get through the experience unscathed. I put on a completely different personality, in order to deflect my embarrassment. (The beginning of a psychotic "Sybil" split, I realize). I could not go over there, and just be Sheila, because then I would ONLY be aware of my embarrassment, and my shyness, and my not wanting to intrude on his privacy. The man was having a nice dinner after a hard night's work! And he was sitting next to Lorne Michaels! The only way I could survive would be to put on another personality, the kind of personality that doesn't care about intruding on someone's privacy, the kind of personality who is OBLIVIOUS to embarrassment.

My personality-transformation occurred on my stroll over to The Rock's table.

All intellect and cerebral worrying disappeared during that walk. All shyness and capability of embarrassment was somehow stuffed into the background. My walk changed. It became a sultry un-worried stalk through the tables. I even adjusted my blouse so that the cleavage would be more apparent. And perhaps he might notice THAT as opposed to be annoyed that I was interrupting him at a VIP party.

I told you. It's embarrassing.

I cannot defend myself. My behavior is indefensible. I know. But I'm just telling it to you like it happened.

I whored myself for an autograph from The Rock.

It's terrible.

Stridently ignoring my own inner shriekingly shy personality, I sultrily leaned down next to him, giving him a flirty oblivious smile. He glanced at me blankly, like: "What the hell do you want?"

I said, in a whispery giggly voice completely not my own: "Oh God, I'm so excited to meet you ... I'm friends with some one in the cast..." (I hoped that that would convince him that the cleavage leaning in on him actually BELONGED at this party. I went on, needing to get it over with as quickly as possible) "You were SO GREAT tonight." (I blush to report that I actually GUSHED. I GUSHED about The Rock's performance.)

He nodded, calmly. Like a dignified Scorpion king. "Thank you very much."

"My two young cousins promised me I would ask for your autograph. Would you mind???" (Yes, I spoke those exclamation marks.)

He kind of didn't want to give me the autograph - it made him uncomfortable in that setting - Lorne Michaels glanced up at me, like: "Who is this woman? Is she supposed to be in here?"

But I remained oblivious (on the outside) to how much I was disturbing him - and it was that very oblivion which made him give in. If I had actually been acting like myself - well, first of all, I never would have gone over there at all. New Yorkers, in general, let celebrities have their privacy, because we see them all the time. And second of all, if I had been acting like myself, and had seen the look of discomfort on his face, I would have immediately said, "Oh, I'm sorry to disturb you - Never mind!!" But because I put on this "I am oblivious" act, he had no choice but to sign an autograph for me, just to get rid of me.

Once he was done with me, I raced back to the table, gave the autograph to Mitchell (who had been watching the entire thing, just LAUGHING) - and writhed in embarrassment at the entire affair.

We talked about it obsessively.

"Oh God, Lorne Michaels had NO idea who I was ... The guy SO did not want to give me the autograph!! ... I re-arranged my CLEAVAGE to get an autograph from THE ROCK - HOW AWFUL!!"

Stay tuned...

for the mortifying tale of my personal moment with The Rock a couple of years ago.

I come out of this story appearing supremely ridiculous but it is NOT MY FAULT.

Expert Essay: Chili Recipe, by Dean Esmay

Here is the second "expert essay" I have received for my new Expert Series. (If you think you're an expert on something, anything, please send me an essay and I will post it.)

Dean Esmay, a great friend of this blog and this redhead, has sent me his theories on chili, and his recipe for chili.

CHILI
by Dean Esmay

Chili is a Texas creation, a Texas invention, and a Texas tradition. It was created as a cheap food for cowboys, one that could easily be made while riding the hard trails, and that would also travel well. In other words, it was quick and easy to make, but could be made to serve lots of people over a long period of time. Following the herds across country, a group of cowboys could start a pot of chili, and continually add meat scraps and fat to the pot over the weeks as they traveled--and it only got better as the trail went on.

Indeed, one of the secrets to good chili is that the longer you cook it, the better it gets, and if you let it cool down and reheat it, it continues to be not just edible, but to improve with time.

The great problem is that most benighted souls believe foolish things about chili. Having never actually eaten the real thing, they often have the foolish notion that chili has noodles in it, a cringeworthy notion to say the least. However, almost as bad is the odd notion that chili is supposed to have beans in it. Or tomatoes.

Think about this for a minute. Chili is cowboy food. Food made by and for cowboys traveling across the ranges away from civilization, in the 1800s. There were no canned tomatoes, and certainly no fresh tomatoes on the trail. There were no pasta makers. And there certainly weren't any beans--beans require you to soak them in water for a day or more and then boil them for hours more just to make 'em edible. Chili is fast, easy food, and is made up of nothing but ingredients you can travel with safely without refrigeration, or scrounge while you're on the trail. That really means only a few things: meat, chili powder, and possibly a few wild leaks, onions, or a little garlic. Maybe a few wild vegetables on top of that, but damned little.

So let me set y'all straight: real chili has no pasta, no beans, and if it has tomatoes, onions, green papers, or any of that in it, it ain't got much. All that other stuff may make for an interesting flavor, but the more of it you add, the further away you are from real chili. Maybe you like that other stuff, but I'd encourage you to at least once try the real, authentic chili, just so you understand what you're really doing when you throw in frills like beans, tomatoes, or [shudder] pasta.

Here's how to make real cowboy chili. Start with the following ingredients:

2 lbs coarsely ground beef (not lean!)
2 ounces of animal fat (bacon grease or beef suet--the pork fat's a little better)
2 cloves minced garlic
1/2 cup chopped onion
3 tablespoons chili powder (McCormick's is authentic enough, although you can mix your own with cumin, ground red pepper, oregano, cumin, black pepper and salt if you're aggressive enough)

Yes, that is the entire ingredient list!

First, render your pork or beef fat--basically, fry it over a low heat until it melts. An iron skillet is best if you want to be really authentic. Remove the rinds from the fat, if any. Then add in your ground beef--again, course ground is better. Brown the beef over medium heat, just so it's nice and even--do not overcook! The meat should be nice and tender is all. As it browns, go ahead and throw in the chopped garlic and onions.

Do not, repeat, DO NOT drain ANY of the fat off.

Once the beef's brown all around, slowly start sprinkling in the chili powder, stirring smoothly and steadily as you sprinkle it in. Once it's all in, slowly reduce the heat, and let it simmer at a very low, mildly bubbling heat for at least two hours. Check and stir occasionally.

Add a moderate--I said moderate!--amount of salt to taste. You shouldn't need much though!

You'll notice the consistency changes rather dramatically over time. It will get thicker and thicker. As long as the heat is low and you have already mixed in the chili powder thoroughly you can add a little water if it gets too thick, but keep in mind that it's supposed to be thick--real chili fans will tell you that a spoon should stand up if you stick it into a bowl of real chili!

That's it. Two hours and it's ready to eat. However, the longer it cooks, the better it'll be. Four hours, six hours, no problem. Start it in the morning and eat it for dinner, no problem. Refrigerate and reheat the next day, even better still. You can't cook it too long.

Sound boring? You'll be blown away with how good it is. Bonus: if you're on a low-carb diet, you should notice that this is a very low-carb recipe. A cup or two of this stuff should not mess up anyone's low-carb diet. When my wife was pregnant and on a low-carb diet, I made this for her at least twice a week!

Adventurous things to experiment with:

A fresh, sliced jalapeno or two will add a nice kick. A SINGLE fresh tomato chopped into the mix isn't too far from the original to be sacrilegious. A single chopped green pepper might not hurt either. However, I encourage you to try the plain original recipe at least once, to understand the basis of what real, basic, plain old chili is really before you start experimenting with frills.

And remember: real chili can't be cooked too long!

Hope you enjoy it, and I hope you'll try the real thing at least once in your life!

Another Expert Essay here: A day at the races

Expert Essay: Horse Racing, by Michael Thomas

I have already received my first "expert essay" in my new Expert Series, and I am very excited. It is just as obsessive and as interesting as I had hoped for.

Now, without further ado, I give to you (complete with his own parenthetical digressions): Michael Thomas

Oh, and discussion is encouraged!!

A Day At The Races ... Without Groucho
By Michael Thomas

A day at the races actually begins the day before. When you pick up the Racing Form, which, contrary to popular belief, is not that hard to read.

The Form consists of data, logically and, some would say quite artfully, presented. Each race is described by its conditions. That is what horses are eligible to run in the race, the distance of the race and the surface over which it will be contested (dirt or grass). (Parenthetic digression #1: Not all horses or races are alike. Novices often get this wrong. All horses and races look alike: brown animals of indeterminate sex running in a big circle. But, there are actually horses that have never won before [maidens], horses that won once, twice, three times, etc., horses that are good enough to run in stakes races and horses that lack enough ability that they need to run in claiming races [races in which they can be purchased (claimed) for a designated price]. Then here are your colts and your fillies and your geldings. There a dirt horses and turf horses, and they are not interchangeable. See, it's complicated ... but not that hard.) So, the conditions tell you what type of horses are running in the race. In Lit Crit parlance, the conditions give you context.

Then, each horse is listed in post position order, accompanied by the record of its last twelve races. Called "running lines," these data tell you what post position the horse broke from, where it was early, in the middle and late in the race, as well as where it finished. Your job, should you choose to accept it, handicapper Phelps, is to compare the running lines against the conditions of today's race, and against the other horses running in the race, ie. how has the horse run in similar races, at today's distance, on today's surface and against similar animals? You want to be scrupulous about comparing apples to apples. (Parenthetical digression #2: this is about the point in the presentation, when showing my wife how to read the Form when she said, with exasperation: "I GET IT okay?") Anyway. Not much further.

Now we come to the modern panacea of horse racing handicapping ... SPEED FIGURES. A self appointed group of geniuses (called students of time by handicapping legend Steven Crist [son of Judith]) invented a convoluted system for converting the final time of a race into a number that supposedly designates how "fast" the race was. (Parenthetic digression #3: why not just go by final time you ask. Because that would be misleading. Not all tracks are the same. Some surfaces are slower that others. Also, conditions change from day to day, even hour to hour. So these guys figured out a way to account for these changes (the genius part) and assign an absolute value to a race's speed that is predictive from day to day and track to track.) These figures work ... relatively speaking and with caveats. I won't go into those here for fear of losing the one person still reading this (Sheila did say "obsessed," right?)

Assertion #1: Given that all the horses you're examining fit the conditions of the race they are entered in today, THE FASTEST HORSE WINS. Easy, right?

Assertion #2: If more than one horse appears to be the fastest (within a few speed figure points) BET THE HORSE WITH THE LONGEST ODDS. Makes sense, no?

Now, thanks for reading all of the above, but file it away. It won't do you that much good. Everybody who's any good at the game knows all this and more.

What most players don't know - even the high rolling big boys - is how to spot a winning race horse today, now, in this race about to go off. That's what's fun about a day at the races. You're in a beautiful place (come to Belmont or Saratoga in New York this spring, summer or fall and I dare to keep the breath from escaping your lungs in an awed gasp), watching magnificent animals run gracefully and fast. And on many occasions the winner will flag himself or herself for you in the Post Parade. It's neck will be arched. It's eye will be steady and intense. It's gait will be purposeful and eager. It's manner confident. No kidding. Watch carefully. The winner will announce itself. (If more than one horse fits this description, bet the one with the highest odds.) It's the last edge in horse racing for the observant player.

A day at the races: beautiful scenery, magnificent horses, exciting races ... and beer. Come on out.

Announcing: Expert Day

This is a repeat. (How do I keep something at the top of the page for an entire day? I'm sure it's easy but I can't figure it out.)

Okay, so I'm kind of a geek, but bear with me:

I have all of these regular readers - some I know by name, others I do not, some I know a little bit about, some I have actually gotten together with, etc. - but I thought it would be fun and interesting to open up this forum a little bit.

I want to institute a series which I will call, in my geeky splendor: "EXPERT DAY".

Everyone out there is an expert in SOMETHING.

Be it: making the perfect cheese cake, how to fix your carburetor, tips on how to get your kids out of the house in the morning - all on schedule, how to construct your resume ... or, something along the lines of: An Obsessive's Guide to Bob Dylan/U2/The Replacements ... or An Obsessive's Guide to Persian Poetry, to The Boston Red Sox (or whatever) ..."I am an Expert on Preparing your Taxes and Finding Little-known Deducation" ... "I am an Expert on the films of Judy Garland" - whatever.

There's a wealth of random knowledge out there and I want my hands on it.

I love people who are obsessed with things. Who are passionate about things.

It does not matter what you are passionate about, as long as you are passionate about SOMETHING. (There are limits to this, obviously. If you are passionate about setting up killing fields in the rice paddies of Cambodia, then I don't really want to hear from you the best way to go about it.) But I have a ton of random obsessions: the history of totalitarian regimes, American theatre, Nirvana, the Bronte sisters, outer space ...

You get the picture.

I want to host a series called "Expert Day" - If people would send me essays on their obsessions/the subjects which they are "experts" on ... I will post them in an ongoing series.

Really, the sky is the limit here. Recipes to resumes, child-rearing to Elvis Costello-watching ... I don't care.

If you're interested in this, please send me your "expert essay" in an email to redhead2@sheilaomalley.com - and I will begin to post them immediately.

Kurt Cobain - you bastard - I miss you

Warning: The following post is extremely rambling, but I figure the title of my blog should pre-empt any complaints. One other thing, if the only thing you have to say is: "U suck for liking that whiny a**hole!!!" - take that shit somewhere else.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the suicide of Kurt Cobain. I hesitate to even write his name on my damn blog, because he (and his daughter) are Googled beyond belief - anytime I have written about them (and there was one brief post about his daughter - I will not put her name here) - I am overwhelmed by random people getting to me through Google searches, and writing incomprehensible ignorant comments.

If you ever want a boost in traffic, just write the words "F****** B*** C*****" - and watch the SiteMeter fly.

I was a bit late to the Nirvana party, as I usually am - but once they got their hooks into me, I was lost. Lost in a world of admiration, awe, and love. "Lithium" is, hands down, one of their greatest songs. Perhaps my favorite. I never "get over" it. I never hear it, and have a complacent response - the response of someone who has heard a song 5,643 times. "Lithium" never fails to shock, or to generate some response. It is rare you can say that about songs. At least it is for me. There are only 2 other bands which continuously have the power to 'GET' me - to make me rise up out of myself - the music lifts me up out of the mundane - U2 and the Beatles are the only other two bands which have that honor.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit", to me, is along the lines of those great and controversial books - books which end up being lightning rods for different groups with axes to grind. Catcher in the Rye, for example. Huck Finn. I recently re-read Catcher in the Rye for the first time in ages - and still was bombarded with its newness, its danger, its absolute insistence on playing by its own rules.

A good friend of mine said once, "There's a reason why people who go up into clock-towers to blow away their neighbors often have Catcher in the Rye in their back pocket." There was a long pause, as I contemplated these bizarre words. My friend added, lighting up a cigarette, "I try not to think about that book too much."

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" has the same effect on me.

I try not to think about that song too much.

Ezra Pound commanded other poets to "Make it new". "Make it new!" was his battlecry for modernist poets. Let poets shatter the old forms, let poets turn to non-traditional sources of inspiration ... etc. Ezra Pound was, in my opinion, a bit of a blow-hard, and a bit of a wacko (just a bit!!) - but the "Make it new" command, while certainly a bit overblown, is a perfect battle-cry for any artist - who perhaps is overwhelmed by feelings that what he creates will not be accepted by the public - or that what he creates is ahead of its time, or that he is way too behind the times, etc.

Nirvana "made it new". Of course what they really were doing were recycling old forms in a new and startling way - You can hear the Beatles in Nirvana's music. You can definitely hear Metallica. They had a punk-rock sensibility - but also ushered in the whole loser grunge look.

Many imitators followed. Pale reflections. This does not diminish the startling originality and exciting sound of Nirvana. Just because those who came after (and who are STILL imitating them) are boring, and sound recycled - does not mean the original sound isn't unbelievable.

Nirvana turned radio stations on their ears.

Nobody knew that Nirvana was coming. The late 80s music scene, as you all will recall, was dominated by Huey Lewis (nothing against Huey) and Madonna and insipid pop groups. It wasn't a real acoustic sound, it certainly wasn't a heavy sound - and radio-programming was extremely rigid. It had been a long time since there had been a revolution in how music actually sounded. (At least a long time in terms of pop culture trends.)

Nirvana shattered expectations. The publicity departments of the record company was completely unprepared for the mass hysteria which erupted, like a brush fire. They were not being pampered, they were not expected to bump Michael Jackson off the top 10 (which they did - only weeks after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was released).

This is akin to Julia Roberts becoming a massive movie star after the release of "Pretty Woman".

The PUBLIC decided that Julia Roberts was going to be the next big movie star. The PUBLIC chose her, anointed her, whatever. Her agent, the studio, etc - nobody was prepared for the insanity which exploded after that film was released. It didn't even have a massive marketing budget. Julia Roberts was not on the covers of movie magazines, she was not being pointed to as "she's the next It girl - look out - here she comes - Introducing: Julia Roberts!!"

You can see how the film industry starts to churn into spin-mode on occasion. They decide that Gretchen Mol is the next "It girl". Or now it's Sandra Bullock - or Charlize Theron ... It wasn't until Charlize Theron trashed her image as the "perpetual It girl" that she actually got the recognition she deserved.

Julia Roberts was on location in South Carolina, filming "Sleeping with the Enemy" when "Pretty Woman" opened. The opening weekend was astounding - numerically. It took everyone by surprise. And it built and built and built - the movie never stopped - the crowds got bigger and bigger and bigger - and suddenly Julia Roberts, an unknown 2 days before, was the biggest star in the world. She was on location, unaware of what was happening - not being in the center of the movie universe - and finally her agent called her and said, "Have you read the trades?" "No ... what's up?" "Uh ... you're a huge star. You can't believe what is going on out here..."

Even her agent was surprised.

I love the story of the ascent of Julia Roberts for that reason. The movie-machine can decide FOR the public: Here is the next biggest star!!

Often, they are wrong. (Look at Heath Ledger. Matthew McConaghey. And the eternal example of Gretchen Mol.) Not that these people are not talented - not at all.

When the movie industry decided "Heath Ledger is going to be the next biggest star" - the press he started getting was WAY overblown compared to relatively thin body of work he had behind him. Which is fine - that's the job of the spin doctors - They hope that some of their spin will stick.

But when the movie-going PUBLIC decides that they love someone - it is a whole different animal. You can FEEL the difference. (If you pay attention to this kind of stuff, I mean, and don't just treat the entire enterprise with cynicism and scorn.) Public adulation becomes a runaway train. It is an outpouring of love. Not just admiration for someone's talent - but love.

Nirvana was anointed by the PUBLIC. And yes - the timing was right. There had been a music scene developing for years in Seattle - kind of a local scene - but very powerful, with devoted fans. There was a larger and larger movement of people sick of what they were hearing on the radio - sick of pre-packaged acts - and pre-packaged looks - and related to the grungy look of these boys from Seattle.

His death pisses me off on multiple levels. And is one of the reasons why I am such a huge Dave Grohl (and Foo Fighters) fan.

Dave Grohl has bucked the odds. How does one top being in Nirvana? How does one top being in the band that changed everything? That spread throughout the world like a brush fire?

He has. I love to still see his smiling face, I love seeing him - (and he's everywhere) ... because he was a part of that original Phenom.

It's like seeing Ringo Starr show up in an interview. I mean, it still kind of blows me away. "He was a Beatle. What was that like?"

I still regret that I never got to see Nirvana play. That would have been something else.

After the Beatles played in Giants stadium (I think it was Giants) - really, the first time a rock band played in a stadium - everyone thought they were insane and egotistical - and, of course, the concert sold out in 6 minutes ... but anyway, people said that the screaming during the concert was so loud and so incessant, that no one could hear the music. But it didn't matter. The screaming WAS the music.

Paul McCartney, when asked about that concert, said something along the lines of: "We couldn't hear ourselves play. It was madness. And - you know - we were the only 4 people in that stadium who had never seen a Beatles concert ... and we could hear everybody screaming and I thought - Wow. The Beatles must be pretty damn good, eh?"

I'm pissed that you killed yourself, Mr. Cobain, because I would have loved to see what you ended up doing, what collaborations you would have made, how your music would have evolved. Like your friend Dave Grohl.

Kurt Cobain and Miss Love named their daughter after Frances Farmer - the doomed 1940s movie actress (immortalized by Jessica Lange in the film "Frances") who had basically been chased out of Seattle on a rail after writing an essay at age 14 entitled "There is no God". Frances then went on to become involved in Russian theatre, she hooked up with The Group Theatre in New York - and then went to Hollywood - where her wildness, her impetuosity, her alcoholism, and her refusal to play by the rules made her multiple enemies, including her own mother - and she finally ended up in a mental institution - imprisoned there by her mother - where a lobotomy was performed. She was never the same again. The wildness and freedom of her spirit had been cut out. It is a brutal story - with no redemption.

Kurt Cobain, not surprisingly, was haunted by Frances Farmer - and she was the inspiration for the first song on their second album "In Utero". It's a great song. Filled with rage. It's called "Frances Farmer will Have Her Revenge on Seattle".

It's so relieving to know that you're leaving as soon as you get paid
It's so relaxing to hear that you're asking wherever you get your way
It's so soothing to know that you'll sue me, this is starting to sound the same
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad

In her false withness, we hope you're still with us, to see if they float or drown
Our favorite paitent, a display of patience, disease-covered Puget Sound
She'll come back as fire, to burn all the liars, and leave a blanket of ash on the ground
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad

It's so relieving to know that you're leaving as soon as you get paid
It's so relaxing to know that you're asking wherever you get your way
It's so soothing to know that you'll sue me, this is starting to sound the same
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad

RIP, Kurt Cobain. I hope you have found your comfort.

And Francis Bean: may you find your comfort as well. (Thanks for the reminder, Em.)

Calling all my readers

Okay, so I'm kind of a geek, but bear with me:

I have all of these regular readers - some I know by name, others I do not, some I know a little bit about, some I have actually gotten together with, etc. - but I thought it would be fun and interesting to open up this forum a little bit.

I want to institute a series which I will call, in my geeky splendor: "EXPERT DAY".

Everyone out there is an expert in SOMETHING.

Be it: making the perfect cheese cake, how to fix your carburetor, tips on how to get your kids out of the house in the morning - all on schedule, how to construct your resume ... or, something along the lines of: An Obsessive's Guide to Bob Dylan/U2/The Replacements ... or An Obsessive's Guide to Persian Poetry, to The Boston Red Sox (or whatever) ..."I am an Expert on Preparing your Taxes and Finding Little-known Deducation" ... "I am an Expert on the films of Judy Garland" - whatever.

There's a wealth of random knowledge out there and I want my hands on it.

I love people who are obsessed with things. Who are passionate about things.

It does not matter what you are passionate about, as long as you are passionate about SOMETHING. (There are limits to this, obviously. If you are passionate about setting up killing fields in the rice paddies of Cambodia, then I don't really want to hear from you the best way to go about it.) But I have a ton of random obsessions: the history of totalitarian regimes, American theatre, Nirvana, the Bronte sisters, outer space ...

You get the picture.

I want to host a series called "Expert Day" - If people would send me essays on their obsessions/the subjects which they are "experts" on ... I will post them in an ongoing series.

Really, the sky is the limit here. Recipes to resumes, child-rearing to Elvis Costello-watching ... I don't care.

If you're interested in this, please send me your "expert essay" in an email to redhead2@sheilaomalley.com - and I will begin to post them immediately.

More Martinis

Another martini evening. A gathering of good friends in a lounge on Avenue B. Joey's birthday. A kind of cool place, with exposed brick, tons of candles, and old comfy arm chairs and couches. Unfortunatley, it was also a bit chilly, so we all sat there in our scarves and gloves.

Martinis.

Somehow we all discovered, collectively (please do not ask me how) that - as children - we all feared the coelacanth.

What a random thing.

Somehow, the coelacanth came up - and Liz said, off-handedly, "God, that fish haunted me as a child."

It spread like wildfire.

"Me too!"
"God, me too! I used to have nightmares about the coelacanth!"

We were roaring with laughter and chattering like crazy about the coelacanth.

"What IS it?? Why is it so scary?"
"Didn't they just find one recently?"
"It just is the scariest fish to me - I don't know why ..."

coelacanth coelacanth coelacanth coelacanth coelacanth coelacanth

I found it so humorous: A big Italian guy with pinky rings and a tough New York accent, saying seriously, in this kind of "No kidding" way: "I used to have nightmares about that fish."

HAHA!

Night of the Hunter

Watched Night of the Hunter this morning, this dark rainy morning.

I honestly cannot remember if I have ever seen the thing in its entirety. But certain scenes and images are so famous that I feel like I have seen the whole thing - I know the backstage stories - I know the characters, Robert Mitchum's crazy Love/Hate tattooes - it's such a famous film. Really, one of the high-water marks, in terms of collaborative achievement.

So I sat down to watch the whole thing this morning.

Is there a film more packed full of arrestingly beautiful and terrifying shots? The black silhouette of the farmhouse - against the white white sky ... with the two children walking up the hill ... and someone singing a hymn inside ... and you don't know WHY the scene fills you with dread, WHY you feel so much horror and fear ... but it is THERE.

This film is terrifying.

There is such violence beneath the surface - but, in reality, the most violent moment you see, on screen that is, is a jar of pickles crashing onto Robert Mitchum's head. That's it.

And yet ... I can't think of another film which quite captures the creepy-crawly eerie feeling of impending doom so well.

Charles Laughton, the great actor, directed this film. It's the only film he ever directed - which is incredible. The cinematography is a work of art.

There is one scene when Robert Mitchum (the traveling preacher, who has the letters L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed across the knuckles of each hand) is sitting out in the garden of a house, and two children who he has been chasing are inside the house.

Lillian Gish (one of America's first movie stars) is in this film - and oh God, she is so wonderful you want to reach into the screen and hug her. Now a woman in her 50s, she plays a farm-woman who, late in life, finds that she has a gift for picking up wayward children or runaways. Her house is filled with them.

Mitchum arrives to take away the two children he has been terrorizing and chasing, but Gish knows there is something not right about him. She can feel it, and she pays attention to the terrified responses of the little boy. "What's the matter, John? Aren't you happy to see your Pa?" But Gish is smarter than Mitchum realizes and she finally snaps: "You're not a preacher and you are NOT these childrens' daddy."

He rides off slowly on his white horse, declaring, "I'll be back. At dark."

And there he sits, in full view, in the dark garden, under a streetlamp, singing a hymn - long and slow. It is terrifying. You fear him. You fear him. And all he is doing is just sitting there. Waiting. Biding his time.

Lillian Gish, in stark black silhouette, sits calmly on her screened-in porch, holding an enormous shotgun, staring out at Mitchum, rocking in a rocking chair. She is waiting, too. It is night. The night of the hunter. She is protecting her flock from the monster in the garden. She will sit up all night, with the gun. He stands under the streetlamp, staring in at her, singing a hymn.

And oddly - frighteningly - she starts to sing with him.

It is a duet. Gish sitting on the porch, Mitchum waiting in the garden like a patient hunter ...

They are enemies. She is prepared to shoot him if he comes close. And so the duet becomes this odd battle of wills ... or something. I don't know. It is a tremendous scene - like a nightmare. It makes the ULTIMATE sense, and yet it is still a complete mystery.

This movie is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. It makes modern-day "scary movies" with the thing that leaps out of the closet, or the knife that comes through the wall, like pallid stupid cardboard cut-outs.

Night of the Hunter is psychologically terrifying. Robert Mitchum never runs, never moves quickly, never races after people like the bogey-man. He strolls. He leans against trees. He is seen slowwwwwwwly riding his horse along the horizon.

And the scene of Shelley Winters' body submerged in the river is stunning, and I do not know how they did it. The whole thing is completely surreal, filled with images from out of a nightmare.

Roger Ebert has chosen Night of the Hunter as one of his "Great Movies of All Time", for obvious reasons. It was kind of ignored when it first came out ... People didn't "get it". They didn't know how to label it, or classify it - which file folder to put it in. They didn't realize that many times it is those unclassifiable films that deserve the term "genius". Genius doesn't fit in a file folder.

This movie is terrifying and brilliant. If you haven't seen it - do yourself a favor. It's in the "canon" of great American films now, for a reason.

Here's Ebert's review, if you're interested. Ebert can articulate what makes a movie great.

Roger Ebert's review of Night of the Hunter
Charles Laughton's ``The Night of the Hunter'' (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many ``great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but ``Night of the Hunter'' is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.

Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like ``Kwaidan'' (1964).

Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister ``Reverend'' Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song ``Cautious Man'':

``On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word ``love''
and on his left hand was the word ``fear''
And in which hand he held his fate was never clear''

Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy (``Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?'') And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.

But does this familiarity give ``The Night of the Hunter'' the recognition it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect ``The Silence of the Lambs'' to do many years from now.

The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the ``preacher.'' But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt.

Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.

The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' ``The Magnificent Ambersons,'' and once observed he was ``always chosen to shoot weird things.'' He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: ``Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.'' She quotes the film's producer, Paul Gregory: ``. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.''

Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.

Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, ``How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?'' And answer: ``Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.'' ``The Night of the Hunter,'' he observes, represents ``the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,'' by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher.

Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.

Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (``Not as a Stranger'') it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen ``The Night of the Hunter'' has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: ``Chillll . . . dren?''

The chessboard

Here's an excerpt from the biography of Ben Franklin I am reading right now (the one which has too many "perhaps'" and too many "must have been"s - but still - it's a good read.)

This is a rather legendary tale about Franklin, oft told - it has showed up in most of the other books I have read about this time. I love it. It comes from his long sojourn in France, when he was the darling of the world, basically. All the while trying to negotiate matters between France and the rebelling colonies. He was, at that time, one of the most well-known (if not the most well-known) faces in the world.

Not surprisingly, the relative rarity of his [Franklin's] spoken mots made them the more precious.

One that was long remembered came from a chess match between Franklin and the elderly Duchess of Bourbon. Inexpert, she illegally placed her king in check. Franklin, in the spirit of rule-breaking, captured it. She, knowing enough to realize that this was not permitted, declared that in France "we do not take kings".

With a sly smile he responded, "We do in America."

Check MATE.

My crystal ball says .... Enchilada

Okay, so maybe it was the fact that I had had two martinis last night, and my companion had also had two martinis ...

but when we emerged from the Film Center Cafe and began walking down 9th Avenue, I saw something across the street, which struck me as rather amusing, and a perfect example of New York. 9th Avenue is crammed with shops and restaurants, little holes in the wall, bars next to health food stores next to hardware stores next to Italian restaurants.

I saw a sign that said "PSYCHIC". Right up beside it was a sign that said "ENTERING BURRITOVILLE".

I pointed it out. "That's pretty funny. It's so New York, isn't it? Psychics and burrittos."

However, then the other level of humor dawned on the both of us ...

It read, when put all together: PSYCHIC ENTERING BURRITOVILLE.

As though it were some fast-breaking headline. "This just in! Psychic entering burritoville! Extra, extra - read all about it."

Which then morphed into a couple of riotous re-enactments of a psychic entering Burritoville, with great fanfare.

"The Tarot cards said I need a taco."

"I have read the meaning of the stars, and the meaning of the stars is that I am starving for a beef burrito."

We could not stop with elaborations on this theme. It kind of went on for 25 more minutes, truth be told.

Love martinis. Dirty martinis. All the way.

Must Read

Mario Vargas Llosa on Madrid.

Don't miss it. I was especially moved by his description at the end of feeling enraged that he wasn't actually IN Madrid, on that day in March. Friends of mine who happened to be out of town on September 11 described to me the same sense of helpless rage at not being in the city on that day. This was not a ghoulish desire, a desire to be close to the action - They were devastated to not be there but because it is their HOME - and it didn't seem right to my friends that they were not there in its time of need.

Excerpt:

It has been this free spirit and this unblinkered mentality of an open city, hospitable and democratic, the emblem city of a remarkable transformation of Spain in the last quarter-century, that the fanatics sought to destroy, on the morning of March 11, when they placed in Atocha the bombs that have left more than 200 dead and 1,500 wounded - 12 nationalities, typically enough, being represented among the victims - in the most ferocious terrorist massacre suffered in Western Europe in modern history.

The killers were not mistaken in their target: today's Madrid represents precisely the negation of the radical inhumanity of the obtuse, exclusive tribal spirit of fundamentalism, religious or political, which hates mixture, diversity and tolerance and, above all, liberty. This is the first European battle in a savage war that began exactly two years ago with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and whose inroads will probably fill with blood and horror a good part of this new century. It is a war to the death, of course, and owing to the present fantastic development of the technology of destruction and the fanatic, suicidal zeal that inspires the international movement of terror, it is perhaps a trial even more difficult than those represented by fascism and communism for the culture of liberty.

Compared to September 11 in the United States, the March 11 attack in Madrid has an added factor in terrorist strategy: apart from causing the largest possible number of deaths, the intention to influence the political life of the victim country. It achieved this: thanks to the savage massacre, a considerable number of Spanish voters, hurt and infuriated, voted for the opposition and overthrew the governing party, for which the surveys had assured an easy victory.

Trivia

There is a place on earth, an actual building, where, for 3 short decades, Jews and Muslims prayed side by side. In the same building.

Where is this place?

Diary Friday

When I was 14 years old, I wrote my autobiography.

I came across the small notebook this morning, a notebook filled with my cursive (cursive!! I never write in cursive anymore) ruminations on my childhood, my first memories, the games I played with my friends, my teachers, my crushes … I remember almost NONE of it. I was howling with laughter at points.

I am 14 years old at the time of writing, so my prose is extremely tragic, extremely serious – and yet I do seem to be making an attempt to create some kind of narrative.

It's quite long – 50 pages or something like that – but I'll just post some notable excerpts.

SHEILA'S LIFE STORY

(written at age 14)

The first house I remember living in is the big yellow house. It was in a really gritty part of town, right by the railroad tracks. We had no yard, and we lived on a dusty gravel circle with four other houses. In one big white house lived a couple I only vaguely remember, but they were my parents friends. Ed and Karen. My mother and Karen used to sit outside and play their guitars. I remember my brother and I used to tease Ed and laugh at whatever he said.

In a maroon house across from us lived Carol and Jim Francis. They have three sons, all terribly polite. Carol is tiny and blonde and giggly and loud and wears designer jeans and I love her. Her husband is quiet and serious. I think that Carol would make a good "Peter Pan". She always gushes over me and acts like she really cares about what I say. I think she does, actually. She is very sincere.

In an olive-green house facing the highway (Ed: HIGHWAY! HA! It's a 2-lane road.) lived our landlords. They had a big family that we admired. I remember running over yelling for Debby, their 8 year old daughter – to show her that I could tie my beloved red leather shoes. I was 3 or 4.

My brother and I would sneak in back of Ed and Karen's house to sit in the shady cool bushes and watch the trains go by. My brother called the train "gn gn." His baby-language. We never knew that we were seated in a bed of poison ivy.

Our lives were so simple then. I loved to read and build with blocks and listen to records. My favorite show on all of television was a cartoon called "Kimba: The White Lion". I loved Kimba and his bravery and his sweet shyness. I remember sitting on our dark maroon velvet couch that was frayed and worn and comfy, and watching Kimba to my heart's content. Every Sunday was "dump day". Dad would go to the dump, with all our trash, and Brendan and I loved to come along and watch the swarming seagulls.

We loved to ride our bikes to feed the swans. Down the street there was a big pond with a swan family, we visited them regularly. The parents were beautiful and white, and they had all these grey cygnets following them around. Every winter we took walks on the blustery Scarborough Beach, writing in the sand, and posing on the rocks for my father's camera.

I went to library school, which I adored, and I would ride along the sidewalks, past Peace Dale elementary school, past the old school-house which is now a furniture repair shop, past the "smelly factory" – with my mother beside me. I would be on my green tricycle, with the "Sheila" license plate, and we would arrive at the big turreted ivy-covered library. At the time, I had no idea that right around the corner was the mall and the cinemas and all these restaurants – where now I spend so much of my time. My world stopped at the Peace Dale Library.

On Third Grade:
Then came third grade. My teacher was Mrs. M, and I went in there terrified because I had heard a story that she literally had washed someone's mouth out with soap. I doubt it was true, because she was very nice, even though she did have a slight moustache.

On the Rock Club:
We formed a Rock Club in 3rd grade. This is not as intelligent as it sounds. Basically, we would go out at recess behind a tree, and we would take stray rocks and smash them on the bigger rocks and peer at the broken pieces. Dee Dee, a girl who had always been so brilliant, smarter even than the smart kids, would be the "rock authority". I laugh hysterically now about this little 8-year-old girl going from rock to rock saying, "That? Oh, that's quartz." Or "That must be a metamorphic rock."

The Rock Club was eventually banned for fear that someone's fingers would be crushed along with the quartz and the sedimentary samples.

On Fourth Grade Recess:
The entire class would get together to play "Land of the Lost", our favorite show about people stuck in the world long ago with dinosaurs. There was one girl in the show, Holly, and I adored her. She was very boyish, with braids. She began my first fashion trend: jeans, flannel checkered shirt, suede wallabies, and long braids. But her braids were thin and long and I cried for a whole day because my braids came out thick and stubby.

Anyway, I insisted and demanded that I be Holly, but of course everyone else wanted to be her too, so there were at least six Holly's. None of the boys wanted to play Marshall or Will. Too boring. So they all played Sleestaks. Sleestaks were creatures who looked like tall green scaly humans, and they were scared of light, and they always captured the 3 humans whenever they came near where the Sleestaks lived.

The girls (all the Hollys) used to get furious at the boys, because the moment we stepped out of our fort, the boys would run down, pick us up, and drag us off. We would be thrashing and screeching: "NO! This isn't how it goes!! You have to WAIT until we get NEAR you! YOU'RE AFRAID OF LIGHT!"

We hated the boys for ruining the game.

On doing "Oliver" in the Sixth Grade:
Mrs. Shay announced that the play that year was going to be "Oliver". I remember leaping out of my seat, arms in the air. We were all SO excited. We auditioned. Betsy almost knew she was going to be Nancy, because she heard Mrs. Shay say so, and I wanted so passionately to be the Artful Dodger that I thought I would be sick to my stomach. J didn't know who she wanted to be. The day came. We all raced down the hall and slid into our seats. I remember my heart pounding as I sank low in my seat, suddenly bowled over by the fact that I might not get it. I almost burst out crying just thinking of it. I closed my eyes the entire time she was reading the cast list. Then she said: "Sheila – Artful Dodger" and I screamed at the top of my lungs. Then: "Betsy – Nancy". And then: "J – Fagan." I whirled around to gape at J, and J's eyes bugged out, and she seemed like a ragdoll because she slumped down in her seat in shock. We were three best friends and we got three leading roles! When we were dismissed, row by row, Betsy was out first, then me. Then J came hurtling out of the room, arms open wide. We all screamed and threw our arms around each other and cavorted about in a wild circle. What a day!

On the 6th grade winter (the winter of Andrew Wright, of "spitball Valentine" fame):
Every day after school, I'd go home, get my skates, and tramp down to the swamp in the woods. The swamp had frozen over. The rest of my neighborhood friends were all down there, and every single day I would skate – from 3:30 to 5:30. Katy and Jen, my best friends since I was 5, would meet me down there. We called ourselves "The Three Muskateers"). Non-stop skating for two hours, and then we'd go back to Jen's, for something warm to eat or drink.

Andrew would be there. He is a great skater. He even goes backwards, etc. It got to be a tradition that he would chase me. The boys would steal the girls hats, and we'd have to try and get them back. Andrew ALWAYS stole my hat – never stole another girl's hat – and no matter how hard I tried, I could not get it back. I would zoom right towards him, and suddenly, in a flash, he would dash to the side and skate off the other way.

The little streams through the woods had also frozen – so we could skate along the ice through the snowy forest. It was amazing. Like a fairy-tale.

And then – there was the day of my greatest triumph. I stole Andrew's hat. It was a black and yellow Bruin's hat. It was an ecstatic moment of revenge. I tore off, clutching it, and he was right behind me. He's much faster on the ice, so he passed by me, twirled around so he was facing me, and then stopped abruptly. I smashed right into him, we both teetered and fell, all tangled up in a mess. I was holding the hat under me, and he sat on me, trying to get it.

I wriggled away and zoomed off, skating down the ice path through the woods – I came around the corner and there was an enormous crowd of boys lying in wait for me. It was an ambush. They tackled me. I was on the bottom of the pile, laughing SO HARD – all of it was so good-natured, except one jerk who kicked me in the arm with his skate. A sharp sharp kick with the blade of his ice-skate.

Andrew, my hero, pulled me out from under the pile, and I skated off. I rolled up my sleeve and saw that my arm had a cut on it, and was turning purple.

The jerk then skated by me, and I put my foot out, made him trip, and then laughed outloud as I watched him topple into the reeds.

On Junior High:
My first year of junior high was very bad. I wasn't in classes with any of my friends, I hardly ever saw them, and I became the class scapegoat. People laughed at me as I walked by, left mean notes in my locker, gave me crank calls, and snickered about my clothes. I didn't even know these people, I didn't talk to them, I never did anything to them. In grade school, having good clothes and a boyfriend wasn't crucial, but suddenly these things were the most important things in life. But I kept wearing whatever I wanted, and everyone made fun of me. My life became worse and worse, and my grades dropped. I hated everyone and I dreaded school. School used to be a slice of paradise, filled with fun and friends, and it became a chore. I would fake sickness to stay home.

Losers made fun of me. Now I know that those people are losers, and the only reason they made fun of me is because they are LOSERS, and they have to find a scapegoat to make them feel better, and to make them not feel so much like LOSERS. But at the time, they stripped away my confidence. I hated my face. I looked in the mirror and saw ugliness.

Well, someday I will be a great actress or a rich archaeologist or a famous journalist, and I will look at those gutter scum, and I will smirk at them, and I will laugh at how they are still Losers. I cannot wait for that day. [Ed: Er ... are archaeologists, in general, rich??]

On Junior High again:
I did make some new acquaintances that year – Kate, Beth, Meredith – these people are now new best friends to me. I sort of knew Beth and Kate because of church and Sunday school, but I had never met Mere before. I literally thought she was the best thing to ever hit this earth. She was tall and thin, and always wore jeans, and they always looked good on her. She seemed so breezy to me. That was my word for Mere. "Breezy".

In 8th grade, Mere and I sat beside each other in Math, and we had the best time making fun of the teacher. He loved being macho. When he wrote on the board, he clenched and unclenched his fist, being all macho while he was writing on the board. He wore tight polyester pants, and he sometimes wore a bright orange shirt. One of his shirts had a discolored mark on the back that looked like a semi-colon and it remained there the entire year. He also wore shiny black shoes with buckles, so Mere and I called him "Mr. Pilgrim" behind his back. We wrote notes back and forth the entire period. Honestly. The ENTIRE PERIOD. Sometimes I would laugh so hard during class that I felt like I would suffocate. Math was the highlight of my day. Mere and I literally laughed about our teacher for the ENTIRE year.

At the end of the year, we were all outside playing softball, and I was bopping around in the outfield with my glove, and our Math teacher was up at bat (oh, what a macho man) and he, in his tight blue clinging pants, went tearing around the bases, being all macho, and suddenly – out of nowhere – he froze – and sort of sidled back to home, picked up his glove, and put it over his rear. All of us were staring at him like he was bonkers. Some of the kids near home plate started roaring with laughter, but none of us outfielders could see what had happened.

He started running towards the school, holding his glove over his butt. As he went past me, he hissed, "I split my pants." I stood stock-still. I could hardly believe it – although why I was surprised I do not know: his pants were always way too tight.

Suddenly, Michele, the pitcher, who had heard his confession, started guffawing with laughter – and literally fell down onto the mound, writhing about in hysteria. Mass hysteria then followed. None of us could STAND IT that our macho teacher had split his pants in front of us.

On freshman year in High School:
I was in the Honors English program, I took Algebra, Introductory Physical Science (a disaster), French, European and Russian History, and Drama.

English was very hard. Our teacher was Ms. Preble. She insisted, quite strongly, on the Ms. Always corrected us. "Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms." We used to make fun of that. "So did you hand in your paper to MS. Preble???" She was very much the Women's Libber, which was a bit of a bore. She would drag in all these science and math and history books and point out the male authors, as though we were supposed to be all mad about that, and we would get more points taken off for not using "he/she, him/her" than if we actually spelled words wrong or whatever.

My French teacher, Mr. Woj (short for a long Polish name – we actually all just called him "Woj" – to his face) was the sweetest man in the world, but he did not teach us. We had to do everything on our own. His most common statement was: "Any questions? Good." He was a nut. He chewed on his tie, or flipped it behind him like a cape. He pretended to smoke the chalk. He did splits while we were taking tests. He also hid under his desk as we walked in at the beginning of class, to see if we were talking about him.

I had a big problem with Intro to Physical Science. IPS. I was lost from Day One. I failed the first quarter, which was a living nightmare. It was just formulas and equations, and the entire course seemed pointless. Biology is useful. Obviously. But this?

Kate and I would say, "Oh, yes, it is very important to know the ratio of zinc to zinc chloride produced. It comes up at every cocktail party." [Ed: Cocktail party? Sheila, you're 14.]

I could not stand going in there, and we all hated the teacher with such a passion that it almost became a religion. Mr. B. He tried too hard, I think. I also don't think he liked kids all that much. It was his first year teaching high school kids, and I think he just disliked us, and did not want to know us, and had no sympathy for us if we struggled in his class.

Also, he was a little wimp.

He tried so hard to emanate this learned college professor's physique, and we found it sickening. Mr. B, you're a high school Science teacher, not some professor from England or whatever. His ties were so starched that they stuck out straight from his neck, and he always wore boots. They were like hipster boots. (We all called them his "spurs"). He always looked tight, and cold, and he always carried a briefcase.

The problem with all of this is that it was just an act. You just could imagine him looking at himself in the mirror, all self-satisfied. Either that, or you could imagine him looking at himself in the mirror and crying like a little baby.

He was so unfair with us that parents began to complain. He didn't know what he was doing. We would ask questions and he would give purposefully confusing answers. The entire time I was in there I felt trapped, and when the class was over, I sighed with relief for a C. It was a terrible experience.

Mr. B later had some kind of a nervous breakdown and had to quit his job. But he still showed up at school basketball games, screaming for our team as though they were the Boston Celtics. It was kind of sad.

Oh. By the way. Forgot to mention.

I saw Jersey Girl 2 nights ago.

Before you laugh in my face - remember the former brilliance and vulgarity and truth of Kevin Smith ... I love Clerks. I loved Chasing Amy. I love the whole Kevin Smith thing. I love that he won't move to LA, and still lives in the same town in Jersey where he grew up. Every time I see him in interviews, I perk up.

However:

In light of recent disastrous events (ie: Gigli) - he really should have considered cutting out the prologue altogether, and just putting in a voiceover or something. (Basically, cutting out all the screen time of J. Lo.) It is distracting. The audience was whooping and hollering, myself included. The two of them kissed, and everyone around me just lost it, as though we were in junior high.

There is not enough distance between Gigli and now.

There will possibly NEVER be enough distance between Gigli and now.

I remember when Gigli first came out (and yes, I did go to see it, in a fit of ghoulish curiosity) - Ben Affleck made some damage-control remark about Jersey Girl - which wouldn't be coming out for a long while, but which also had J. Lo and Affleck in it. Affleck assured us, "I want to assure you that we are onscreen together very little in Gigli." I winced when I heard that. WOAH. Imagine saying that about the woman you're supposedly in love with!! Eek!

Anyway. It's not even that the two are horrendous onscreen together in Jersey Girl - I can't even tell if the two of them are good together or not because - quite frankly - I am still wearing Gigli Goggles.

Sidenote: Liv Tyler is absolutely adorable in this movie. You want to hug her.

One other observation:
Whenever there is a school play in a movie - the set designers (for the movie) can NEVER make it look like an ACTUAL school play. The costumes are too nice, too perfect, the props are too good - the sets are always WAY overdone ... Doesn't look like any of the school plays I was involved in! Jersey Girl makes the same mistake. The set for the school play literally looks like it was lifted from the national tour of Sweeney Todd. I can't think of any example of a school play portrayed in a film that actually gets it right.

Parenthood - there's a school play. The set is too nice. Too perfect.
The Sixth Sense - school play at the end. NO WAY are those costumes and that set from a school play

I'm the last to figure it out...

I realize this. But I saw Spellbound last night - and realized why everyone who saw this movie FREAKED OUT with love for it.

What an absolutely amazing movie.

None of the multiple themes were hit on the head (which, I think, is one of the qualities of a really good documentary). Let the story tell itself. Let the events unfold. Let the camera do all your work.

It was about hard work, it was about childhood, it was about class distinctions in America, it's about the American dream, about immigrants, about success, about education - education being the key to getting OUT, but also about the nature of spelling-bees. Is knowing how to spell actually knowledge?

For some of the kids, it is. Some of the kids just love language. Love learning words, reading the dictionary for fun. Other kids are like little drones. They don't care about language, they want to win.

These kids - these spelling-bee kids - will break your heart. They will make you think. It is such a deep film. The film-makers followed all of these kids through their regional "bees" - narrowing their story down to 8 kids, who make it to the "nationals".

The kids run the gamut. The privileged girl from Connecticut, who is a brainiac, with supportive parents - mother American, father British who makes comments about how "competitiveness" is part of being American. HA! This from a man who comes from a country who took over the whole damn world, once upon a time. The Connecticut girl is competitive - and almost eager for the whole thing to be over with. I loved watching her compete. A word would come to her. She would think. Then would ask: "What is the language of origin?" The answer would come back. You would watch her brain click through her file-folders of knowledge. And then, out would come the correct spelling.

But there are 7 more kids.

Angela was the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her father worked on a ranch in Texas - and had illegally crossed into the US 20 years before. He wanted his family to have a better life. He has lived in America for 20 years and still speaks not a word of English. His son explains to the camera, with a grin, "He spends his whole day with cows. Why does he need to learn English?" But these parents - these Mexican parents - following their amazing daughter to the national "bee" in Washington DC - watching her propel herself forward, watching her with amazement from the back of the room. The father still in his cowboy boots. My God. It was so damn MOVING. It's so ... American.

That was one of the underlying themes of the film.

One of the fathers of the kids - an immigrant from India - obviously a very successful man - completely believes in the "American dream". Said to the camera: "That is the point of the American dream. If you work hard enough - and you have to work hard - but if you work hard enough - you will succeed. It is there for everyone."

Nupur, one of the competitors, said, "In America, you get second chances. I only placed 3rd last year - but I'm going back this year. In India, you don't get second chances."

But it was the young black girl who ... absolutely captured my heart. My God. She is from the ghetto in DC. Her mother was drunk throughout the interviews, saying ignorant things, completely ... Well, I think she was intimidated by her daughter's spelling ability - but she made sure that she basked in the glow.

She focused on how because her daughter was black, the papers weren't publicizing her successes. (Only she said "publisicizing") Meanwhile, the filmmakers show a montage of all the newspaper articles about her daughter. This mother ... ooooh, I was so PISSED. She was ignorant of what knowledge really means. It was all about the cash prize for her. She said, laughing, cigarette in hand, "Hell, I would spell every word in the dictionary if you gave me 10,000 dollars!" And there is her daughter, studying, studying, studying with her amazing teacher, using Scrabble letters to put the words together. It takes hard WORK. Her child's not doing it for the MONEY, woman!! Money doesn't make it easy! Her daughter struggled, sacrificed, committed herself to this goal - This little girl ... God. I rooted for her so much, because she, of all of them, has the hardest road ahead of her.

But she assured us, (and I couldn't even believe she actually said this - it sounded like something from a script - but it just came right out of her mouth): "My life is like a movie. It's all about overcoming obstacles. I have to just keep overcoming. But ... I don't know why, but I pray all the time. I'm like a prayer warrior."

A prayer warrior.

I hope that girl gets out. I will be a prayer warrior for her!!

The tension was AMAZING. You wouldn't think the filming of a damn spelling-bee would be riveting. I burst out applauding, in my apartment, at one point, when one kid spelled a word I had never even HEARD of. Jeesus. I thought the child would falter, but they prevailed, and there I was, crying out, "YEAH! YEAH!"

It is a GREAT film.

If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor. Rent it. It's beyond great. It will stay with me for a while.

TS Eliot knew of what he spoke

April is the cruelest month.

Bitter rain, bitter wind in the face, grey skies obliterating the spire of the Empire State Building.

It's the weather where I feel most like myself. I wake up, hear the rain on the window, and think: Ahhhh. That's more like it.

None of this harassing sun. None of this tormenting brightness. Wrap me up in grey and I feel like a million bucks. Perhaps it's a leftover, or a cultural memory, or something like that ... ancestors from County Mayo, a land of brown and grey.